The $10 Payment That Cost Me $43.95 – The Madness of SaaS Chargebacks

> What I don’t understand is why some people can’t just reach out and request it — instead of going straight to a chargeback.

Customers don't want to "reach out" if it means hunting deep in their account settings to find the cancel button, or calling a number which may or may not lead them through an endless phone tree to waste 5 minutes talking with someone on the retention team reading from a script.

People don't remember they signed up.

They can't remember how to log in from a different device to cancel.

It's easier to use their credit card app to dispute the charge.

The company name is different than the product name - even a slight difference may indicate a scam, like all of these highway toll scams using a slightly different domain name.

A worker or family member signed up using someone else's card, and that person has no idea what the charge is for.

People expected one thing from your SaaS product, and got something else that they are not willing to pay for.

They rarely check or read their email.

Your account reminders are going straight to spam.

The communications around the product, pricing, or requirements was lacking.

I very rarely refund anything, but when I do, I send a single email that I want a refund and if it isn't done promptly I will chargeback. It's usually the best customer service I get. No security questions, no Indian call centres, no "are you sure" questions. I don't blame people for just hitting the dispute button though. Years of piss poor customer service has conditioned it.

"Banks almost always side with the cardholder, even when we provide clear logs and evidence."

-- sigh unfortunately it's the opposite in 3rd world countries like Indonesia. I've had my cards physically stolen on the airplane. Despite having all the evidence and common sense ("I'm in city X airport and the disputed transactions happened in city Y, you're saying I went there immediately after landing and return to the airport just to queue for immigration, all in an hour?"), none of the banks accepted my chargebacks that I filed few hours after incident.

The banks are Bank Mega (national, private), BNI (state-owned) and DBS.

We have very few chargebacks, not even 10 in 10 years and we consider us lucky. Stolen credit card happens more often than chargeback. I don't attribute it to better messaging or easier cancellation options, we do the same as many others, I guess it's just the type of product of customer.

Even in HN comments I've seen people saying they use temporary card numbers (valid for one transaction only) or click a button to dispute instead of a single email. That button in the banking interface might be "block future payments" or such. They must've bad experience with companies in the past?

Actively emailing with the customer sometimes helps. It worked for us. Sometimes it didn't. For example if it's a company credit card and the employee left the company. Their accounting team simply doesn't know what our service is for.

At this point the fees are part of "cost of doing business".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44382686 is an example where a customer was unhappy about merchant charges and seems to contact the banks only, not the merchant.

Add a warning email 24 hours before the transaction. In the subject put "You'll be charged $10 for renewal in 24 hours".

> we also provide a simple, self-service way to cancel the subscription

It's hard to comment without seeing screenshots and description of the process. When people are cancelling under a perceived threat (will be charged otherwise), any inconvenience will become an extreme one.

I just created an account, and the subscription page in the app shows a $50 charge, while the public pricing page shows $10 with 'Minimum 5 seats' in small letters.

Your post says about $10 charge, I am not sure how it happened with current flow.

Be very direct about the pricing, and please use your own product so customers are not confused.

https://beeimg.com/view/d3295639248/

This is something good about the Apple AppStore, they handle the chargebacks and no ridiculous fees incurs(When a refund request is initiated, they will send you a consumption info request over API to ask for your opinion but ultimately its their decision and its handled by them). That's why I don't have a problem with Apple's cut as they handle something that's actually quite complicated and annoying. Their control over the content(what's allowed) is another story though, of course.

This is essentially why everyone is willing to refund these type of payments when customers reach out.

TL;DR: We run multiple SaaS products on Stripe. Even with clear renewal reminders, invoices and easy cancellations, some users skip refunds and go straight to chargebacks.

A $10 payment ended up costing us $43.95 recently. Banks almost always side with the cardholder, and the only reliable “win” I’ve seen is when the customer withdraws the dispute themselves.

So here’s my question to the community:

What’s really going on here? Why do banks completely ignore the terms customers agreed to when they subscribed, or even in cases where the claims are obviously false? And why aren’t customers required to provide any proof at all?

What actually prevents someone from using a SaaS product, filing chargebacks every time they cancel, and essentially getting refunded for the last several months of usage?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Perhaps this is a question you should be asking yourself. Is your cancellation system working? There was a billing session created the day after the initial charge, are you sure there wasn't an attempt to cancel the that the system failed to register and log due to an error? If I try to cancel and it doesn't work, I'm not gonna waste time trying to figure out how to work around it or filing a bug report. I'm gonna go straight to the charge back.

Is your cancellation mechanism consumer friendly? You don't do proration when people cancel and say you only "meet them halfway" when they go through the effort of requesting a refund in response to this user hostile policy.

There are a lot of very user unfriendly policies and implementations. Sometimes companies that legitimately try to do the right thing get caught in the blowback, but more commonly, companies aren't as user friendly as they like to pretend and have adopted at least some of the pervasive dark patterns.

I am curious if Apple Pay has the same chargeback issues for merchants.

It boggles my mind that this is a surprise. Let's start with this:

> What’s really going on here?

Reality. You need to prove something: that the card holder made the purchase to the standard the banks set and you can't. It's as simple as that.

> Why do banks completely ignore the terms customers agreed to when they subscribed or in cases where they’re clearly making false claims?

Because your agreement with the customer is not the only agreement in play. You accepted these chargebacks and that process when you accepted credit cards.

> And why aren’t customers required to provide any proof at all?

You can't prove a negative. I can't prove I didn't authorize payment. And, because it's online, you can't prove I did. "logs, screens, terms, full context" are not proof. None of that is useful or proof in any way that the card holder made the purchase.

> What actually prevents someone from using a SaaS product, filing chargebacks every time they cancel their subscription, and essentially getting refunded for the last several months of usage?

Credit card number limitations. Why would you accept a payment from the same credit card number again? Also, repeat offenders can be blocked by payment providers. This is the way a lot of online stores work.

> Would love to hear your thoughts.

A few more points...

> "The Madness of SaaS Chargebacks"

It's not SaaS chargebacks. It's just chargebacks.

> The worst part is that it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose a dispute — the very fact that it was filed still counts against your account.

Yes. The reason it counts is because you are problematic, or at least attract problematic customers. This ends up costing the banks money. I'm sorry, but if you had a problematic customer that cost more money than you made from them, you'd probably stop working with them, too.

> Still, we always submit evidence.

Not the evidence that matters. You need evidence that the card holder authorized the payment. I promise you, nothing you submitted proves that.

> Inside the product, we also provide a simple, self-service way to cancel the subscription without any questions asked.

Do you ask for the username and password? Right... and if I didn't sign up for the service to begin with, I didn't agree to the TOS.

Let's also address one more thing:

Facts:

> Charge was processed August 12 (regular billing cycle). > Subscription canceled August 18 (6 days later). > Dispute created August 19. > The claim is false.

Nope. The problem is when the person requested the subscription be cancelled. Not when your system recognized it.

> the customer doesn’t have to prove anything

The problem is when a customer requests you cancel their subscription, and you say you will, and you don't do it until 6 days later.=

The problem is when a customer goes to request to have their subscription cancelled, and your service is broken and doesn't recognize the cancellation and they don't realize it never cancelled until 6 days later.

I can keep going.

Let's try this: prove to me the customer didn't submit a request to cancel the subscription when they said they did.

That's right, you can't prove a negative.

I can keep going on, but you can find lots of information on this and why it is the way it is. If you don't want to deal with this, there are other options that eliminate or reduce the chance of chargebacks. But you won't find those as popular. Because they aren't customer friendly.