“Companies that operate with the popular subscription-based model may be charging you money without you knowing. This could be in the form of hidden fees, by making it difficult for you to cancel a subscription, or even by signing you up for recurring payments when you make a one-time purchase,” Brian Rashid reports for Forbes. “Yahya Mokhtarzada realized the prominence of this problem when he was charged sneaky fees for in-flight wifi he had signed up for months ago. Annoyed, he did his homework and found that this situation is very common.”
“He teamed up with his brother, Idris, and founded Truebill, an app that detects and monitors recurring subscriptions. Not only does Truebill identify these payments, but it allows users to cancel unwanted ones with a single click,” Rashid reports. “The app goes a step further to ensure that the subscription is canceled by monitoring the user’s bank account the following month. In the event that the company did not follow through on the cancellation, Truebill will contact them and give the user a refund. Best of all, this service is completely free – an incredible price considering the average Truebill user saves $512 a year.”
“Truebill is not anti-subscription. In fact, they educate the user on popular subscriptions with reviews on their website and recommend new ones that will increase the user experience. Truebill is, however, anti-subscription mismanagement,” Rashid reports. “They recently launched a tool that monitors subscriptions and warns the user if a price goes up.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Holy crap, we’re scared to even find out…
Oh, okay, we’ll gather up our courage and go for it! Truebill via Apple’s App Store is
People don’t go through their account activity themselves? I guess it helps me having a separate account for regular spending vs recurring autopay bills. I make it a habit to never mix the two, this way my autopay bills are a short list to examine.
That makes a lot of sense, Kate. Another strategy to help keep things straight is to dedicate one credit card for all online purchases.
Incidentally, the most frequent avenue for credit card fraud that I have observed is restaurants. Your credit card leaves your presence, giving unscrupulous people the opportunity to copy all of the information (including the “security code” on the back). Quite a few colleagues have run into fraudulent charges during or immediately after business trips. I almost always pay cash at restaurants while on travel.
In Europe the credit card machine is normally brought to your table. If not I hold onto my credit card and follow the waiter to the machine. It is not an infallible way of paying but the best I can do.
In Poland, at least, they NEVER take your credit card away. It may even be a law. In my experience the payment process is much easier in Europe than even in Silicon Valley. Maybe I’ll run into it this trip but I haven’t yet encountered “tap to pay” (there’s always an extra step involved with inserting the card, entering a pin, signing, etc.) while I do it in Poland all the time. The few times I’ve used Apple Pay here its been inconsistent and oftentimes more annoying than just using a card.
Truebill an scam/accident waiting to happen. The app promises too much. Don’t believe it.
No way. You need to watch your own accounts for reoccurring monthly payments.
You could be right. The app is free, so where is the revenue stream?
You could be right. The app is free so where is the revenue stream for the developers?
With the proliferation of malicious apps these days you have to be extremely dim witted to let any app other than the one made by your bank to monitor your bank account. lol😂😂😂.
Speaks volumes about MDN, who I suspect are Android users. They claim to own every hard to get Apple device on first shipping day…yet they never do an unboxing…
Either way, they are dumb as…
Be careful. If an app is monitoring your bank account, um, uh, that’s major privacy you’re handing over to a developer.
But wouldn’t it be great to have a consumer app revolution where we could swiftly and boisterously kick parasitic, customer hating and abusing companies right in the balls. I dream…
IOW: Yes Jarexx! Sorry I missed your post.
And… Yes Gollum! 😉
$500 a year savings on average? That’s ridiculous. A claim like that screams “run away from this.”