Premium billing pain

[philipmulcahy]

I am slightly at a loss for how to deal with an increasing rate of chargeback attempts.
This post is initially going to be a cathartic rant (catharsis is good!), but I'm hoping it can turn into something constructive.
I am very interested in users thoughts on this subject - please do join in!

Chargebacks are bad because:

1. So far, none of them are justified
   They ignore the subscription terms and/or make accusations of fraud.
   It's clear that some of them happen when a user sees a charge they don't recognize and don't do their homework before firing their accusations.

2. They consume a lot of my time, and emotional energy
   Both users and their banks tend to use pretty brutal language (which is compounded by their self-serving non-arguments).

3. They enrich Stripe, who charge $20 no matter what the outcome, for sitting in the middle and taking responsibility for doing nothing except relaying the claims and counter claims.

4. The overall costs of one user getting a few dollars back cancels out about 5 other users' contributions, which is money that the hospice doesn't receive.

What have I done?

i) Made the sign-up language much more assertive:

What am I contemplating doing?

i) Naming and shaming folks who initiate chargebacks without apparent cause

ii) "Banning" those users - e.g. making it hard for them to free-ride after they have inflicted cost on the project

iii) Looking at removing auto-renewal - this will inevitably generate angry users when their scrapes stop working, and thus support work for me, but it'll not be jumping through hoops with Stripe and users' banks - see below for some options.

iv) raising the rate above $7.50/year: e.g. socialise the pain

End of Auto Renewal?

Auto renewal presents at least a couple of problems:

1. users forget about it, ignore warning emails and then get embarrassed/angry/unreasonable (the reason for this post)

2. the platform I'm using (ExtensionPay) doesn't allow existing users to be charged the new rate - they get their renewal at the original rate rather than the current rate.

It's not yet clear to me that I am able to use ExtensionPay to have "one year and done" subscriptions - research required, but at the moment there appear to be some alternatives:

A) no autorenew, but otherwise leave things the same - this would have the beneficial side effects of eliminating most failed payments (that happen when autorenew fires on an expired card); and of only taking payment from an actively engaged user.
B) one-off lifetime payment - difficult to know how to price this one, and most apps that do it end up cheating in the long run - new functionality ends up happening in a new app or a new super duper subscription etc.
C) Pay for calendar year - you buy a calendar year. If it's late in the year, then you get less value for your money.

What would you prefer?

[philipmulcahy]

Here's the first obviously blatant false chargeback user's ID: wdshopping@comcast.net, seemingly based in Houston.