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Ask IH: How do you manage automatic payments?

Hi everyone!

Do you also face this issue when an automatic payment is deducted from your PayPal, stripe, or credit card for a SaaS that you no longer use or any publication like Medium that you are subscribed to and never use? Or even an online paid community?

I wonder how much money is everyone loses?

I was building something to cope-up with this issue and wanted to confirm if anyone else also faces this issue.

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    Yeah, this is something that I ran into within the past year. I added bank alerts for all of my accounts when there were purchases or withdrawals, and I was surprised that there were a few recurring things that I had assumed were canceled. It was easily adding up to hundreds of dollars a year.

    For what it's worth, there's a service that performs this for consumers called Trim. The automatic payment part is completely free, and they charge for things like negotiating your bills down.

    It seems like they're focusing on financial wellness nowadays, and maybe you can find niches that they don't handle very well, like finding recurring subscriptions from business accounts and the like. I can imagine that if you can find a reliable way to get people into the door, you could generate a decent amount of cash by identifying the right pricing model. For example, here's a table of different amounts you could get by charging different amounts [0]. Charging 2 months as a one-time fee seems reasonable. Charging 5 seems unreasonable. You'd also need to find a way to differentiate yourself from Trim, since they do it for free.

    [0] Publicly writable. So feel free to mess around with this, but make a copy if you don't want other people messing it up

    1. 1

      Thank you so much @jakevoytko for pointing out Trim and providing an example table.
      I'll do some more research and look for a way to make it easier.

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