Nothing is Free on the Internet

Economists always like to say that nothing is truly free.  'Caveat Emptor' or buyer beware is another favorite expression.  Still the best of us will drop our guards from time to time.  And if you see this article as just me venting, you are right because it has just happened to me.

If you are going to work on the Internet with other people, you need to share data.  You could certainly email files back and forth to each other.  However, in this day and age maintaining files on the cloud is certainly attractive.  This allows analysts separated by physical distances to work together as if they were working on the same local network.  This is particularly attractive during 2020 with Covid 19.  And the best part about this is that the cloud memory is free.  Right?

The companies that are providing these cloud memory services are not charities.  Still they have found that the best way to market their subscriptions is to get people to sign up for a free service, then find a way to get them to 'upgrade' to commercial version of the product.  This becomes a game as the users of the services always prefer services to free and will try to keep their usage at the non-paying levels.

Providing free samples is a perfectly reasonable way to market.  When does this become a problem?  If they have your credit card number, they can start charging your card when the period is over.  If you had tried the service out and it was not for you, the story does not end there.  You may have actually agreed to an automatic renewal somewhere in the fine print that you clicked.  Then after a year, you may find that you are paying for a service that you have forgotten about.  What can you do in this circumstance?  It appears that there is no real court and your only resort is to throw yourself to the mercy of the service.  In my case, it was a happy ending as Dropbox refunded my fee.  However, there was no legal reason it had to work that way.

The moral of story. and most of you already know the answer it to avoid automatics like the plague.  This blog just serves as a reminder to really think twice about giving out that Credit Card number.

Something so small has so much power