Posted by jmsflknr 10/29/2025
I constantly see ads for services like RocketMoney which helps people find and cancel subscriptions. I could arguably be in the "too much money" camp, but I couldn't imagine seeing an unknown/unused charge on my credit card bill and not immediately cancelling it. Nonetheless, RocketMoney seems like a widely used product.
I don't go over my bill every month but get a notification upon every new charge, and sometimes the only way I know that a charge I just put on at a store is the same one I got a notification for is because the charge amount is some relatively unique number.
I have a friend who tried to switch to a MVNO (Cricket, I think) to save money and immediately switched back. Even though both companies were on the same network, the MVNO customers must have had a lower priority, because their service level was noticeably worse when literally the only thing that changed was the SIM card.
The thing is, this is highly variable -- and also geographically variable -- and some MVNOs can now offer similar priority as a mainstream plan. US Mobile is one, which I've been using for a couple years. Their neat advantage is that they will sell you a SIM (or e-sim) that rides on your choice of the big 3, and they'll also let you port between them without any other change to your account. They call this "Tele-Port". Some people will do that even just to go on a vacation to a state with different "best carrier", since there's nothing stopping you.
That business model is what a lot of tech companies actually bank on that why they require a credit card on a free sign up.
Forgetting that you have a small amount deducted for a service you are no longer using, isn't. It is minor oversight.
The way that language is abused by people when it comes to these sorts of subjects is bordering on semantic manipulation. Which in itself is a form of deceit.
But, of course, no one can tell off the comfortable class. It's "perverse" and "abuse" and "deceit" and "manipulation". eyeroll
If the subject were as minor as you say, you wouldn't be trotting out that kind of characterization. I hit a nerve.
Additionally: it seems likely that it was the result of gas station pump skimmers, just because the card in question had never been used for any other kind of transaction.
I don’t want to think about how much money I’ve paid them over the years for VMs I no longer need. A week ago I finally pulled the plug on those servers. Not a moment too soon…
https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discont...
And I have people in my contacts whose active email ends in "@aol.com".
It is a sad reality that this company keeps buying good products and making it hostile for users who made it good, such as in the Komoot's or Meetup's case.
You might say, however, that a business that wants you to actually for a product is a real sustainable business.
Perhaps more than you think.
I was recently looking through an e-mail distribution list that my company uses and was surprised how many @aol.coms were on there. Easily hundreds.
People in the tech bubble vastly underestimate the number of @aol.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @earthlink.net and other legacy e-mail addresses regular people still use. After all, it's their e-mail address. Why would they ever change it?
It'll be interesting to see what they do with AOL. That business itself was an amalgamation of other businesses over time, so they may find a mirror image of themselves once they start to dig into the weeds.
AOL owns neither of these
I think there's something kind of astute here, which is that anyone who is still using AOL products at this point is someone who is very resistant to changing "email and web content properties" providers, and is likely willing to passively tolerate additional enshittification and monetization
On the other hand, they are the easiest demographic to scam out of money, which seems fitting for a company like AOL.