Not at all. I do the same thing, and the key is to cancel the subscription immediately upon signing up. You keep the one month you've already paid for, and don't need to worry about recurring cost.
I recently forgot to cancel a one month free trial for a HTC Vive marketplace (yes, even they got some bullshit monthly sub going), and they locked me into a year long commitment.
I’ve turned very sour to these monthly renewals and accounts I can’t keep track of anymore.
To use a deeply HN metaphor, it's kind of like pulling in a 3rd party library into your source code. No matter how convenient it is at the moment, you have to account for the cost of the ongoing maintenance over time; sometimes you look at that and decide just to never pull the library in the first place.
Similarly, if I'm on the fence about some service, this is the tie breaker for me; the risk of forgetting to cancel it. Even though I do scan my bank account around once a month, I do naturally pay more attention to the bigger transactions and can easily skim past a $8.99 for a few months before noticing I accidentally left something on.
(Fortunately, where I am, it's just an annoyance. Affording individual subscriptions to all the things I may conceivably at some point want to use would be a noticeable kick in the pants, what with the proliferation of them, but accidentally leaving on one service is just an annoyance.)
I’m now using virtual disposable card for any subscription to a service I'm not sure to use more than one month. If I forget it that means I don't use it and the subscription will end itself.
If I somehow still need it after the first month, I usually get a email reminder or a message about payment processing failure and I can fix that with a non-disposable card.
It highly depends on your country, some banks offer that as a service (most do in France where I live) in EU a lot of online banks do too (Revolut, Lydia, N26, etc) I don't know in the US, I think privacy.com does but I have no recommendation.
I have a capital one credit card that allows unlimited virt cards that basically can only be used at one online merchant. I use this card exclusively for subscriptions, then pay it off every month.
Doesn't have to be monthly - sometimes I have months at a time with no subscription running at all. Once one "fills up" or there is a specific show I want to watch _now_, I activate that service and immediately cancel it. I guess it is more of a chore than just leaving them all subscribed and having access whenever - but the savings are easily worth it to me.
Binging a few shows and then not watching anything for months is probably a healthier lifestyle, but I imagine most people with streaming subscriptions are too accustomed to watching something every day/week/certainly month for that - guilty myself, exhibit above: I just assumed 'sign up and cancel in any month you want to watch something' would mean every month!
I do the same thing. The only inconvenience is it adds an extra step when you want to watch something after your subscription runs out (resume the subscription and cancel). Google play and the app store make this super easy.
I hear, it’s doable and it works but very few people do it because it takes patience and care. Most of these services use dark patterns to lure users into not doing that. If a larger percentage of users did it streaming services would quickly change policies.
Still sounds stressful and like a chore. I would feel "forced" to burn through as much of the backlog as possible during that month, even if I don't feel like watching something from it right now.
Related to what olex said, if you're "saving" over $100/month because you don't have 8 other subscriptions running, you can tell yourself quite reasonably you're already saving a lot of money and you don't need to squeeze the value out of a monthly subscription that's less than one fast food meal's worth of money.
The whole point is to enjoy the service; if you feel stressed because you feel forced to binge everything to get your "value", well, cancel that service too. It is apparently not bringing you that value. That will help you get over it pretty quickly.
May be. To me it's easily worth the hundreds of Euros in savings from not having running subscriptions to more than one service at a time. Oftentimes I have no running streaming subscriptions at all. I guess I watch a lot less than many people do.
Just automate the watching process too, and get ChatGPT to summarise the content. Even better if you can let it watch with you, give it feedback, and tune it over time so it can make a value call on shows and save you the effort - "yeah I watched that, so you don't have to, you'll hate it".
(/s, but I imagine it won't be in a year or two or with a skilled coder).
I use virtual cards generated on privacy.com for streaming services. You can set the limit based on how many months you want to pay for, and not worry about forgetting to cancel.
