THIS CLEVER NEW SERVICE AUTO-CANCELS YOUR FREE TRIALS
EVERY TIME YOU sign up for a free trial of any kind, you’re forced to take stock of your outlook on life. Realists accept that they’ll eventually wind up paying for this thing that is currently free. Pessimists understand this too, but are prematurely embittered even as they plug in their credit card numbers. Optimists assure themselves that they’ll keep track of when the trial ends and they’ll cancel before they are ever charged, if it turns out they don’t want to continue.
Oh, the naiveté. It’s not until these sunny, positive thinkers are digging through their transaction history in their banking app months later that they see it: $89 a year for a mobile VPN membership? What on earth? And then they remember: It was April, Game of Thrones was finally returning for the last season and they were in Canada, a place where HBO inexplicably doesn’t exist and so they signed up for a free trial of a mobile VPN to try to stream it on their phone. Only it didn’t work because they had terrible Wi-Fi signal service, and they fell asleep whimpering in their hotel bed, watching as the spinning loading wheel of death never advanced and they forgot all about the free trial they’d signed up for.
OK, maybe I’m actually talking about me here. But if you’re anything like me, you can relate. You sign up for these “free” trials with your credit card, forget about them, and then are left paying for a service you aren’t using.
As of today, there is a more convenient way for you to cancel before ever being charged: a service called Free Trial Card. It's available now through the app DoNotPay, created by 22-year-old wunderkind coder and entrepreneur Joshua Browder.
The Free Trial Card is a virtual credit card you can use to sign up for free trials of any service anonymously, instead of using your real credit card. When the free trial period ends, the card automatically declines to be charged, thus ending your free trial. You don’t have to remember to cancel anything. If you want, the app will also send an actual legal notice of cancelation to the service. The DoNotPay app will send you an email when you sign up for a service, and another when your trial ends—a way of nudging you with the reminder that if you want to convert your trial into a paid subscription, you’ll need to update your payment info and hand over your actual credit card number.
“The idea for this product came when I realized I was being charged for a $21.99 gym membership from over a year ago that I was never using,” says Browder.
[link:https://www.wired.com/story/free-trial-card/|
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Nothing is free. Just remember that. And don’t sign up for this crap.
I got nailed in the 90s for $800 worth of “free” golf clubs that of course were returnable until I read the fine print and realized that I had missed the return window.
Oh, and the clubs were complete shit. Didn’t know that any golf club could be that bad.
The people running the scam ended up getting charged in federal court and going to jail.
But I didn’t get my money back. No one did.
Since then I made a rule. If anything that is free requires me to input a credit card then it’s not free. And I don’t don't do it.
Of course, I’m drawn to this service or app or whatever it is... 
Never have and never will because I know their game and I know my lazy self.
Kinda reminds me of when my then 12yo son stole my credit card in order to view porn online. After *months* of explaining his unauthorized use and unsuccessfully denying charges to the c.c. company, I had to cancel the card. I'm sometimes tempted to remind him of whata little a.h. he once was. Btw, he's grown into a very successful, responsible young man now.
