> Apple does a really good job of warning me, I feel, and centralizing subscription cancellation etc., and that's huge. Like, if I have to go to your app--or worse, your website--to cancel a subscription? I'm gonna just not use your stuff, because I'm going to forget about it until you whack me for another year or whatever.
So then we have two possibilities.
One, you're an outlier and nobody else cares.
Two, many users care about this enough to refuse payment systems that don't have it. In that case there will be a market for another payment system that has easy cancellations but charges ~5% instead of 30%.
* Two, many users care about this enough to refuse payment systems that don't have it. In that case there will be a market for another payment system that has easy cancellations but charges ~5% instead of 30%.*
That line of reasoning holds when all else is equal, which it almost never is when it comes to apps. No matter how passionate anyone is about payment systems, it’s still extremely unlikely to rise to become the determining factor when deciding to install an app. If a person wants to play Fortnite with their friends, but doesn’t like the payment system, they don’t magically get to choose a Fortnite clone with a payment system that’s more to their liking.
> a market for another payment system that has easy cancellations but charges ~5% instead of 30%.
I’d happily pay for such a system if I could *trust* them to continue acting in my interest by not leaking my details or interest and actually cancelling subscriptions without pushback from the provider (say, will the free version still grant access to my files).
I don’t know many players that I would trust with that and that are big enough to not be intimidated by providers.
That trust can be misplaced: God knows I trusted the NYTimes for being a nice company, but their unsubscription process was horrific, demanding to call from a US phone number (guess what: it’s really hard when you are not based in the US) and then refusing to cancel a non-US subscription if you do…
After dealing with that too much, I genuinely only trust Apple to do it consistently. I might trust Google too; I’m hoping that data scientist at Facebook know to model the brand impact on retention to argue it’s financially preferable to let people cancel… Even companies where I lead the analytics team and where I made the case passionate for instant cancellations, it was such an uphill battle. And it was lost again as soon as they thought I turned my back, because of some middle-manager obsessed with their short-term number.
So then we have two possibilities.
One, you're an outlier and nobody else cares.
Two, many users care about this enough to refuse payment systems that don't have it. In that case there will be a market for another payment system that has easy cancellations but charges ~5% instead of 30%.
Either way nobody pays 30% anymore.