Fuck Subscriptions
Naming and shaming all "recurring spending models" where a one-time fee (or none at all) would be appropriate and logical.
Expect use of strong language.
Follow the basic rules of lemmy.world and common sense, and try to have fun if possible.
No flamewars or attacking other users, unless they're spineless corporate shills.
Note that not all subscriptions are awful. Supporting your favorite ~~camgirl~~ creator or Lemmy server on Patreon is fine. An airbag with subscription is irl Idiocracy-level dystopian bullshit.
New community rule: Shilling for cunty corporations, their subscriptions and other anti-customer practices may result in a 1-day ban. It's so you can think about what it's like when someone can randomly decide what you can and can't use, based on some arbitrary rules. Oh what, you didn't read this fine print? You should read what you're agreeing to.
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Some other groovy communities for those who wish to own their products, their data and their life:
Some other useful links:
Louis Rossman's YouTube channel
Look at content hosted at Big Tech without most of the nonsense:
view the rest of the comments
I wanna know: Where is the better business bureau? Do they do any actual work to protect consumers from these shady business practices? Where's the legislation to protect consumers from this bullshit? The better business bureau isn't very useful. This type of stuff should be illegal.
They're just a company themselves. They're basically like Yelp from several generations ago... They're not a consumer protection agency so much marketing/reviews from back when it all had to be compiled on paper by hand
Yeah, I know. I guess my sarcasm didn't come through. Sorry. The best you can do is write a letter to your state's Attorney General, whose office doesn't have time to be bothered.
My states AG is too busy blocking abortions and trying to make a database of trans people so I'm sure this won't do anything sadly.
I think the more important question is where is the CFPB? I thought they were supposed to have teeth in preventing shit like this.
I’d be curious to know how many complaints about HP get submitted and never resolved.
You do understand what Instant Ink is, right? You're not buying cartridges, you're buying how many pages you can print. If you cancel your subscription and run out of pages to print, it no longer lets you print anything. Call me crazy but that makes sense.
This is pretty awful in the sense that it generates waste but it's also necessary for people not to abuse the system. Think about it like this, I buy 1 month of the cheapest plan, it costs me less than 1 cartridge and 1 cartridge can print more than the maximum amount of pages of my plan, I cancel said plan and keep using cartridge. Do you see how you could "game" the system to buy insanely cheap cartridges?
There's probably a better solution though. For example, they could try to come up with a way to identify people and/or printers used in the way I described before and prevent them from signing up to the service again.
I know a better solution! Just don't have this kind of subscription! It's wasteful, takes advantage of consumers, and it's difficult to understand. It's totally inappropriate to sell a printer to someone and limit / control their use of it with a subscription. The world of printing at home with HP needs a reboot, restarting again from: buy the printer and the supplies for it, print the things. This is why I've been using printers that are not HP since forever. In the old days, HP ink was the most expensive to buy but the printers were very cheap, the cheapest you could find at any store. This company has spent decades and decades controlling the ink and trying to get people to pay for the ink. It all started with being the cheapest printer at the store and being the most expensive ink at the store. 30 years or so later (plus or minus) we have this insanity. I like my setup for home printing. My printer, my ink, my paper. I print all I want.
It's optional. If you don't like it, don't buy it. You can't complain because the service works as described.
IMO this subscription model only makes sense if you have a business and print a lot of pages per month. For a normal user it doesn't make much sense.
Stop with this bullshit. This is exactly the kind of bullshit subscriptions this community is against.
k buddy