Bit of a rant here, but I am currently subscribed to a game development related Patreon because I wanted to follow the development of a project that was interesting to me. The reason I covered the name is that the developer is doing a fantastic job with the project, posting regularly and providing interesting and informative posts, but the main advantage of Patreon is simply that he also provides builds which I was interested in checking out.
Patreon rebilled at the beginning of the month and I thought “Fine I guess, but I don’t really want to pay $6 a month to get test builds of this game” and tried to cancel, assuming it would simply not rebill next month, but instead of cancelling rebilling, Patreon says I will immediately lose access to everything I can currently see on Patreon and new posts for this month, even though it billed me for this month literally three days ago.
There is no technical reason they can’t just cancel rebilling and allow me to access this subscription until the end of the month, but they are clearly hoping I’ll be scared to lose access to what I’ve paid for and will forget about cancelling later in the month, which would be the better time to do it, since I would benefit from access to more posts and development builds. There are a few other subscriptions I’ve used in the past that remove access to everything the instant you cancel, but even Amazon lets me continue free trials of Prime until the end of the trial period when I cancel it.
There are presumably no laws against this, or it was mentioned in some legal bullshit I ignored when signing up, but I do think that there should be a law that forces providers of subscription services to allow users to access their subscription for the entire period for which they have paid, regardless of whether they cancel their subscription if no refund is due.
He’s not getting the product because he’s cancelling the product. That’s not fraud, that’s just the consequence of cancelling a subscription.
If he’s already paid for the month, then he’s paid for the month. I’m not sure what part of that you’re finding complicated.
If he’s cancelling, he’s choosing not to pay for any following months but as this month is already paid for, he should continue to get what he paid for for the remainder of the month.
If cancelling means that he doesn’t get what he paid for this month, then yes, Patreon is essentially stealing his money by not giving him what they agreed to. The only fair solution to that would be if Patreon were to give him a partial refund pro-rated by how far into the month he is, but the wording of their “warning” doesn’t imply that whatsoever.
Not all creators on Patreon work this way. And it seems like in this creator’s case, they do not allow you to ride out the remainder of your subscription after cancelling, and instead process a prorated refund for any remaining time, which, to my understanding, is how Patreon handles this sort of subscription cancellation.
The wording also doesn’t imply that OP won’t get a prorated refund, either. We can’t see the full terms of the cancellation from OP’s screenshot. Without knowing who the creator is or what sort of subscription model they’re using on Patreon, there’s not much to really work with.
Fair enough. I think that at the end of the day, the issue falls squarely on Patreon for lousy wording
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