For those serious about saving a buck or two, there’s no practice that’s too extreme. From cutting coupons for groceries to joining an absurd number of loyalty programs for the freebies, there’s little these bargain-hunters wouldn’t do in the name of keeping more cash in hand.
But as coupons become a thing of the past, and loyalty programs don’t promise the perks they once did, penny pinchers have been struggling to find those little ways to cut back. Enter, free trial hacking.
Many subscription-based companies, like streaming services, offer free trials as a way to entice new customers. These companies get you to enroll in a free trial period, hoping that by the end of it, customers will either be hooked on their offerings to too lazy to cancel their subscriptions.
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As companies work to lock in consumers, the more crafty subscribers have found a way to gamify the system.
“Consumers are way more savvy about subscription free trials and deep discounts and are gaming the system more and more, to the point that it’s become an issue for many subscription businesses,” Robbie Kellman Baxter, a consultant for subscription-based companies, told Business Insider.
The way they go about it varies— some create endless e-mail accounts to nab the offers, others lock the credit card they used at sign up to ensure they won’t be hit with a charge or use “dummy cards” through services like Privacy.com to enroll.
“The goal is to just not sign up for things and then forget about them while still paying for them, which is what I think subscription companies plan on,” free-trial aficionado Stephen Carlson told Business Insider.
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“I feel like it’s realistically not necessarily saving that much money,” fellow free trial hacker Devin Boudreaux says. “But it’s like, oh, this is really easy, it takes two seconds, more or less, and I do think that little things do add up.”
When used correctly, free trial periods can be a win-win for both consumers and companies. They offer consumers a way to sample a service before they commit, and give companies a lower-cost opportunity to acquire new customers.
However, economists like Stanford’s Neal Mahoney say these deals often cost the consumer far more than the company. Free trial offers take advantage of the nearsightedness of consumers, because they tend to view the eventual cost of a subscription as a future problem, not something they need to prepare for at the time of sign up, he told Business Insider.
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They also leverage inertia. Companies make cancellation so difficult, that in many cases consumers will just give up and remain subscribed. One paper Mahoney co-authored found that adding some level of difficulty to the cancellation process increased the sellers’ revenues between 14% and 200%.
“Companies don’t need most people to forget to cancel,” University of Chicago professor Ayelet Fishbach told Business Insider. “Just a few is enough.”
It’s knowing that companies are engaging in these sorts of vaguely-predatory tactics that leads people to play the system. “I don’t have any ethical qualms with it,” one unnamed “fiend for a deal” told Business Insider. “I get what they’re trying to do.”
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