Bit of a rant here, but I am currently subscribed to a game development related Patreon because I wanted to follow the development of a project that was interesting to me. The reason I covered the name is that the developer is doing a fantastic job with the project, posting regularly and providing interesting and informative posts, but the main advantage of Patreon is simply that he also provides builds which I was interested in checking out.
Patreon rebilled at the beginning of the month and I thought "Fine I guess, but I don't really want to pay $6 a month to get test builds of this game" and tried to cancel, assuming it would simply not rebill next month, but instead of cancelling rebilling, Patreon says I will immediately lose access to everything I can currently see on Patreon and new posts for this month, even though it billed me for this month literally three days ago.
There is no technical reason they can't just cancel rebilling and allow me to access this subscription until the end of the month, but they are clearly hoping I'll be scared to lose access to what I've paid for and will forget about cancelling later in the month, which would be the better time to do it, since I would benefit from access to more posts and development builds. There are a few other subscriptions I've used in the past that remove access to everything the instant you cancel, but even Amazon lets me continue free trials of Prime until the end of the trial period when I cancel it.
There are presumably no laws against this, or it was mentioned in some legal bullshit I ignored when signing up, but I do think that there should be a law that forces providers of subscription services to allow users to access their subscription for the entire period for which they have paid, regardless of whether they cancel their subscription if no refund is due.
For the United States, that is correct. It is up to each business to dictate how this works.
Yes it was. Patreon's Terms of Use
There are two things being discussed here. The service and the payment. The first statement indicates that a change between you and Patreon on terms will affect the payment on the next cycle, so if you were billed monthly on the next month. But a change between you two will affect the service immediately.
There is a distinct possibility that they actually cannot do this because they've never asked their programming team to write such a thing in their payment processing. Can their programming team write such a thing? Oh absolutely. But if they've not actually written such a thing, then they cannot technically do it because it just simply does not exist. I written software for some time now, and this kind of technical, has actually happened to me where the dev team asked if such should be programmed and higher up indicated specifically that such SHOULD NOT be written for pretty much the reason that it thus prevents such from ever being a possibility to be offered to customers. So just FYI, their software might not be able to do this by purposeful omission of such. It would not be the first company to have done this.
I think this kind of practice is shit. And the "free but if you don't cancel becomes a monthly subscription" kind of stuff the FTC is looking to add to their list of dark business patterns. I won't bore you with details but the FTC is pretty hit and miss with their regulations and Congress is constantly in a back and forth of giving it super charged powers and making it toothless. So companies that can, usually litigate the FTC until a new President or Congressional composition comes into play that will pull back the FTC.
You know what's really crazy is in other industries, things like pro-rated and payment terms must match service terms, all of that is required under law. I'm in an industry now that has such regulations and boy if the law didn't require it, they sure as shit wouldn't do it. There's nothing stopping these same tried and tested laws from applying to online services, outside of lobbyist "asking" Congress and State Assemblies to not do such. So I agree with you there, this kind of pattern in online services is shit. But they are absolutely legally allowed to do this kind of bullshit.
Frankly, whether the code is written or not is irrelevant to whether or not Patreon could do it on a technical level. Not having the code written =/= it can't be done, and saying it like this is just pointless pedantry. You knew what they meant.