On Tuesday I decided to make some monthly subscription changes and cancel the Bring Your Own Plan from AOL ($14.95) that I don’t use but maybe a couple times a month. Since AOL seems to have no cancellation form online I contacted their “Live Help” and they told me that I had to call them to cancel. Upon calling them they couldn’t locate my account and wanted me to give them the full credit card number used. I said, er, no, don’t think so. Since we don’t live in a very big town I know there couldn’t be that many people in our zip code with AOL service and I told them that their search engine must not be very good. Finally we got my wife on the phone and they were able to figure out who we were and cancel the account. Gee, so the third degree to cancel our service. 

This is the same BS that Real and some other companies do, I found out, after reading this entry: Audible.com making account cancellation difficult and also so does TiVO, also according to Jeremy. What’s wrong with these companies? Here’s a list that I put together of companies/websites that folks online have reported (that I’ve seen) that require you to call them in order to cancel their service. You might want to know this going in …

REQUIRED TO CALL TO CANCEL/QUIT SERVICE LIST:
AOL
Audible.com
ComCast
DirecTV
Real
TiVO

If I’ve made a mistake please post in the comments and let me know and I will edit accordingly.

BTW, on Tuesday I signed up for the 14 day free trial of the Safari O’reilly book service for reading books online, which I like so far from what I’ve seen. As I’ve mentioned before here, I’ve been reading PC Magazine through a digital subscription via Zinio for nearly a year. There are things to miss about not having the print versions, but in general I like digital subscriptions (especially the search aspect).

• Don’t have machines call your customers, Sirius
• Canceling credit cards can be profitable
• Real Player 10 Beta - not unreal
• Repair purgatory
• How to cancel Y! music?
• .Mac renewal as email-only account?