Soon after we purchased a new smart TV for our living room, my husband signed us up for Hulu so he could watch a television show he liked but had missed on cable. At $7.99 a month, I thought Hulu sounded like a pretty good deal, especially since I thought I had convinced my husband to cancel our monthly cable subscription.
Once I realized that my hubby was going to have a ridiculously difficult time breaking up with cable, I asked him to cancel Hulu because we never used it. I assumed he had canceled it. I found out today — thanks to Truebill — that I was wrong. We’ve been paying $7.99 a month for more than two years for a service we never use.
Now Truebill is working on canceling my Hulu subscription for me for free. And it can help you, too.
Truebill and Trim are startups that help users identify subscriptions — by connecting to your bank account and credit cards — and then canceling the ones you don’t want.
Subscriptions are big business these days. You can order seemingly everything through a subscription now, from diapers, razors and makeup to meal kits and wine. According to Fortune, the average Truebill user has doubled the recurring fees the user is paying from 5.5 to 11 over the last two years.
“Subscriptions are a great thing,” Truebill co-founder and CEO Yahya Mokhtarzada told NBC. “But with no platform to manage them, having too many subscriptions becomes overwhelming for users. We want to solve this headache for consumers and give people an easy way to discover, manage and customize their subscriptions.”
Although you can sign up for both Trim and Truebill for free online, Fortune said Trim recently launched a paid service offering for those especially hard to handle cancellations. Now, for $6 Trim will do the legwork for a subscription cancellation that involves more time and work to complete.
Trim said its most requested cancellations are for Kindle Unlimited, CBS All Access, Experian Credit Reports and Planet Fitness. Mokhtarzada told Fortune that the services with the highest cancellation rates on Truebill are those that users need just once but get charged as subscriptions, like stamps, faxing, background checks and credit checks.
According to its website, the average Truebill user saves $512 per year by canceling unwanted subscriptions. Truebill also notifies users of price changes on subscriptions.
“A lot [of companies] are sneaky when it comes to unannounced price increases,” Mokhtarzada told CNN Money
In addition to finding Hulu, Truebill found one other subscription I had overlooked. Thanks, Truebill.
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