'I ended up paying £500': Your subscription trap stories

'I ended up paying £500': Your subscription trap stories
When Neha paid for an online CV builder, she thought she was only making a single transaction.
"In order to download the CV, you have to pay. So I did that, and I just thought it was a one-off thing."
But two years later, she discovered she had been signed up to a monthly subscription with the service, LiveCareer, and over £500 had been taken from her joint account with her husband.
"My husband just assumed it was something that I had signed up to, so he never questioned it at the time," said Neha, 50.
In a time where there seems to be a subscription for everything - from security cameras to meal kits to shaving blades - many of us have been caught out by direct debits we didn't even know we signed up for.
And the cancellation process can require a Herculean effort.
After the government announced a clampdown on "subscription traps", many people got in touch with BBC Your Voice to share their stories.
Neha says she contacted LiveCareer to get the subscription cancelled.
"I emailed them to say, 'Look, you know I've not used this and you've not communicated at all about this'."
She said LiveCareer agreed to cancel the subscription but would not give a refund.
"Because it's an American company, I can't go to Small Claims, I can't go to Trading Standards," Neha said. She is seeing if she can get a chargeback from her bank.
"Their website sort of implies they've got a UK presence, but they haven't.
"I know it's my responsibility to check statements, but it's so easy for these companies to just carry on taking money."
A spokesperson for LiveCareer said it was "committed to transparency" and aimed to make its subscription terms clear.
"Information about billing, including whether a service is part of an ongoing subscription subject to auto-renewal, is presented throughout the user experience.
"We also communicate with customers regarding their subscription through transactional emails and reminder notification, which include details about access to account settings where subscriptions can be managed or cancelled at any time."
'Never again'
Some people say they've resorted to fibbing about illnesses, emigration or even prison sentences so the company will stop trying to keep them signed up.
Others have simply cancelled the direct debit with their bank, but this can impact your credit score – and it doesn't cancel your contract with the company.
One company mentioned by several readers was Adobe, the maker of Photoshop and Acrobat.
When Carmen, from London, took out a free trial of Adobe Creative Cloud, she wanted to subscribe for three months.
But she found herself on an annual contract, with a £250 cancellation penalty.
After a year, she tried to stop it from auto-renewing, but was told she had missed a "very specific" cancellation window, so was locked in for another year.
The same thing happened the following year.
Carmen said: "I'm usually very careful about tracking and cancelling subscriptions, but Adobe Creative Cloud's approach felt especially unfair and difficult to manage."
She added that if the cancellation process hadn't been so difficult, she may have dipped in and out of a subscription as and when.
But her experience made her decide: "Never again."
Adobe has been approached for comment.
Strategies to make cancelling harder
The government's new rules are designed to make cancelling subscriptions as easy as signing up to them is. That should mean no more "endless phone calls" where they try to persuade you to stay a little longer.
Firms will also have to remind customers when a free trial period is about to end or if a contract is about to be renewed, and you will get a 14-day cooling off period in case you change your mind.
It could save the average person £170 a year, according to the Department for Business and Trade.
For now, consumer bodies like Citizens Advice warn people to look out for the common strategies firms use to make cancelling harder. These can include:
- "How to cancel my subscription" is often buried and the process may require multiple click-throughs
- Behavioural nudges – like more colourful larger buttons – encourage you to click on options that keep you signed up
- Pop-up screens will warn you of what you'll be missing if you cancel. They may offer you extras to stay
- You may get follow-up emails later designed to lure you back
It might seem obvious that, by having as many barriers as possible in the cancellation process, companies can count on some customers giving up and keeping their subscription.
Consumer psychologist Kate Nightingale says companies actually want customers to associate negative emotions with the cancellation process.
"Obviously, the core premise for them is: the harder you make it in terms of the cognitive effort [of cancelling], the less likely a person is to follow through with that."
If a person has a hard time cancelling a subscription, they form a negative association with the process, not a positive mentality about the prospect of saving money.
At a certain point, Kate says, "the pain of the actual experience of trying to cancel it becomes bigger than the pain of losing a few pounds or a few tens of pounds a month".
She mentions utility bills in particular – if you shudder at the thought of ringing your internet provider to cancel a contract, these tactics have worked.