READING 2 Are Free Trials Really Free?

Are Free Trials Really FREE?

Read the following article. Pay special attention to the words in bold. 8.3

You’re surfing the Internet1 and see an offer for a free trial for a product or service. It might be an offer for free magazines. Or it may be a subscription2 to a music app. You may already have a free music app, but you have to listen to a lot of ads. With a paid service, you don’t have to listen to ads. You can even download music and listen to it offline.

Should you accept the offer? If it’s free, what can you lose? Try it. You might like it. Right? Well, it might not be such a good deal after all. Why not?

First, you have to give the company your email address. The company might sell your email address to other companies. You may start to get a lot of unwanted ads.

Second, it’s easy to start a free trial, but it’s hard to cancel3 the service when the trial period is over. You call the phone number on the website (if you can find it!), and someone tells you, “You can’t cancel by phone. You have to cancel online.”

Why must they make it so hard to cancel? Think about it—why should they make it easy? Your free trial is now a charge to your credit card. You might not notice the charge until you get your next bill. Before you sign up for a free trial, you should read the cancellation policy4 . It might be in very small writing. You should mark your calendar to cancel before the trial period ends.

Here’s the best advice: if you don’t need the service or product, don’t take it just because it’s free. Free trials can sometimes cost you a lot of money.

1 to surf the Internet: to search casually for information online 2 subscription: an agreement to buy a product or service for a certain amount of time 3 to cancel: to stop something 4 cancellation policy: the rules about canceling something