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.

But that's literally (literally 'literally', not an annoying turn of phrase) a monthly 'chore' to sign up for (and cancel) the next one.

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.

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.

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 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.

what do you use for the disposable card?

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.

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’ve used Privacy.com in the US. works great!

FYI you can usual cancel immediately after signing up and it'll keep working until the next bill is due

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

someone is making a rails app right now to enable this as a SAAS. Now you have two problems ..

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.

Seems like it could be an opportunity for a website with all the news shows and movies on each platform. You check off the ones that seem interesting. It tells you what service to subscribe to after you hit a threshold. Not sure if any of the services have affiliate programs for revenue.

Justwatch provides a lot of that and I bet you could automate the rest

Auto-expiring temporary credit card numbers can help automate cancellations after N months, but figuring what shows are on what services and signing up for them as needed is still a major chore.

The Playpilot app helps to get an overview over where (on what streaming services) a movie or show is available.

We use JustWatch[0]. It's good for keeping a "want to watch" list and also tells you which of your services has which films at any one time.

[0] https://www.justwatch.com/

Do you have more details? I found that in my case the credit card provider has ways to continue paying for the subscription through the magic of recurring charges that is very difficult to stop (survives credit card cancelation/number changes).

Right, getting a new card number has nothing to do with the fact that it is the same account. The numbers point to the same account.

It seems the credit card providers would have an anti-incentive to provide this kind of consumer friendly functionality. Maybe Apple's card does? Any first-hand accounts?

Capital One's Eno service allows you to generate temporary credit card numbers with a custom expiration date.

The problem with that is that legally, the contract to pay a provider, and the instruction to your credit-card company to pay a recurring amount, are two separate things. Some companies will send threatening letters, dept collectors etc after you if you just cancel the CC instruction.

It's different on the apple store, where Apple forced providers to agree that a subscription could be unilaterally cancelled via the store. Ideally we would pass a law so that credit cancellation also cancels a contract as long as the minimum period is over. Not holding my breath though.

This would be annoying for people whose credit card just happened to expire and who then have to deal with not having the service for a period, re-signing up, losing loyalty bonuses, etc.

Credit card expiry can have integrations where the merchant automatically gets the updated value

> Some companies will send threatening letters, dept collectors etc after you if you just cancel the CC instruction.

What companies do this in practice. I think I’ve “ghosted” 300 companies and never had a single even send a threatening letter, much less do anything. Usually I get an email of “error processing your card, please fix or we turn off.”

I can’t imagine it is ever economical to pursue in courts over an $11.99/month contract.

The exception is gyms that do seem to go to ends of the earth to collect.

Zipcar tried to do it to me once. But it may depend on your jurisdiction as well.

I had a colleague who used to get monthly calls from a cable co. He was divorced from his wife, who had set up the cable contract, so they wouldn't let him cancel it but were still convinced that he was liable for the money because it was supplying his house.

I wish I had the discipline to manage things that way.

This implies there is something about """you""" that is inherently lacking rather than the habits currently in your brain and "more discipline" often means """if only I would castigate myself more"""

Because I view them via an AppleTV, I subscribe to Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, and AppleTV at various different times all through my iTunes account. It's easy to turn them on and off all through one account interface. The Account Settings page lists both Active and Expired accounts for all the services, along with next billing or expiration dates. It's just a few clicks.

Market opportunity!

A meta streaming service that dispatches you towars the service that has the show you want to watch. Of course it needs to work in colaboration with the actual streaming services and diatribute revenue proportional to services' use. It would create much more real-time competition.