groovyTip: Don’t Wait Till the End of Your Free Trial to Cancel

For me, a free one month trial for an online service usually means one free month and then one paid month because I forgot to cancel my membership on time. A month comes and goes and then I see that credit card charge and I’m like “Nooooooooooo!!!”

The obvious thing to do is to set up a calendar reminder a couple days in advance of when you need to cancel. But recently, I discovered an even better way: cancel right after you sign up for a membership. When you sign up a for a free trial, you have to put in your credit card information and authorize an automatic renewal that kicks in when your trial membership ends. But for most free trials, you can cancel that automatic renewal and keep the free trial active. That way, you won’t forget later.

I just did this for my Amazon Music Unlimited 30-day free trial. After signing up, I went to Your Amazon Music Settings. On that page, there was a tiny link that said: “Do not continue after trial.” I clicked that 5 minutes after signing up for the free trial and I still get the benefits without the risk of paying for another month on accident.

This works for Amazon Music, and I believe it works for the Audible free trial, Google Play Music, and other Amazon services, like Kindle Unlimited. Really, considering it’s a mechanism of the automatic credit card renewal, it ought to work with any free trial: Hulu, Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix, you name it. Try it out the next time you do a free trial and let me know if it works.