We handed over our credit card for 40 online
trials, to find out the real cost of ‘free’
The offer was tempting: I could read
exclusive online articles about my beloved Red Sox on ESPN Insider, for just
$44.95 a year. And to be sure that it would be money well spent, I could sign
up for a seven-day trial. I bit, coughing up my credit card number as part of
the deal.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get off the hook.
The
truth about free trials
Finding Red Sox slugger David Ortiz’s
career RBI totals took seconds on ESPN. But trying to learn how to cancel the
free ESPN Insider trial was considerably harder. I searched, clicked, and
navigated to what felt like every corner of the site, to no avail. Before
giving up I sent ESPN customer service a terse email message requesting that my
account be canceled. The next day, the day that my free trial expired, my
credit card was charged $44.95.
Later I called ESPN customer service, and a
cheerful woman named Yvonne told me, “There is no way to cancel online; you
have to call to cancel.” Why couldn’t I find that out online?
After refusing to refund me 100 percent of
my $44.95, she transferred me to a supervisor who reiterated the refund policy
and then explained how to find the cancellation policy on ESPN.com. I had tried
to unearth a cancellation form by clicking the ‘My Account’ link, but instead I
was supposed to go to ‘Radio and More’ to see the cancellation policy. Who
knew?
Free trials are enticing, but as I learned,
they come with strings attached. Back in April, in order to test how
consumer-friendly free trials are, I signed up for and attempted to quit 40
free trials that required a credit card number. More than a quarter of the
services I tried turned out to be a real hassle to quit.
Free
trials from Hulu and Merriam-Webster were a breeze to ditch
Three of the sites charged me even though I
canceled before the free trial ended. With two other sites, I sound up with a
bill simply because I couldn’t figure out how to cancel before the trial
expired; I blame this problem on poor website design (in both cases
representatives later showed me that it was possible to cancel online). And one
site provided no way to quit the free trial – online or offline – so I simply
gave up.
The news isn’t all bad. Free trials from
Hulu and Merriam-Webster, for instance, were a breeze to ditch. Hulu stood out
because it offered to “remove all [my] personal information from Hulu.” At
Merriam-Webster’s site, saying good-bye took three clicks and less than a
minute.
The biggest hassles
In the chart at lower left, you can see the
12 services that proved to be the most aggravating when I attempted to quit.
These companies failed on several levels: A
few charged me despite my having canceled in time. Nearly all of them made
finding cancellation instructions extremely difficult, requiring me to perform
extensive sleuthing. Many of them forced me to call the company to complete the
cancellation, and threw up technical roadblocks such as nonworking phone numbers
and broken links to cancellation pages. Among the somewhat less annoying
practices I encountered were high-pressure sales pitches from some companies to
make me keep the service, extensive exit interviews, and multiple marketing
messages in my inbox even after we had parted ways.
On the other hand, the free trials that
were best (see the online version of this story at go.pcworld.com/freetrials
for a full chart) made it simple to end the trial, providing clear navigation,
sparing me the aggressive customer-retention lectures and marketing pitches,
and saying thanks for giving them a try.
In all fairness, the hassles I describe
here are a matter of subjective opinion. Another person might find spending 10
minutes on the phone tolerable; for me it was highly irritating.
Free trials and tribulations
Canceling
on the last day of a free trial may result in charges
Days after canceling J2 Global’s 30-day
free trial of the Trust-Fax virtual fax service, I spotted an $8.95 charge from
the company on my credit card statement. Perplexed, I tried calling TrustFax’s
toll-free number to dispute the charge. All I got was a voicemail message: “You
have reached Verizon conferencing. The number you have dialed is not in use.”
The next day I checked the TrustFax site
and found that the customer service number had changed. I dialed the new
number; within 20 seconds after navigating voice prompts, I was hearing hold
music and a lopped message saying, “Your call is very important to us. Please
wait on the line for the next available representative.” After 12 minutes, I
hung up.
As a test, the next time I called TrustFax,
I selected the sales option at the voice prompts, an within 10 seconds a
cheerful sales representative was ready to take my order – but not to cancel my
account.
My fourth call to TrustFax was fruitful,
though. After I waited on hold for 11 minutes, a representative named Leslie
came on the line and said that she would review my account. She confirmed that
my account was closed, and apologized for the billing error. She even refunded
me the $8.95 – but not until after she had kept me sitting on the phone for
another 17 minutes as she confirmed my billing information, put me on hold,
asked me for account information, and put me on hold again. In total I spent
about 40 minutes on the phone trying to stop a free trial that had taken merely
a few mouse clicks and less than 2minutes to start.
A spokesperson for TrustFax later
apologized, saying that I had been billed erroneously because I had canceled on
the last day of the free trial; though the billing had begun the minute my free
trial was over, the company’s processing of my cancellation request had taken
24 hours.
