Xbox live auto renewal

Hello,

I am trying to drive down my gaming cost and I wanted to opt out of the Xbox Live auto-renewal. Turns out that pre-paid vouchers cost half as much as a credit card sub membership. So I go onto the xbox live website and try to cancel auto renewal and surprise, surprise I get an error saying that the option is currently unavailable. Now, I called the call centre and cancelled it fine but, makes me wonder if this is a clever way of making us stick to auto renewal (knowing what a wonderful experience calling a call centre is...). Any one else had a similar experience with this? Thanks

I've cancelled it just fine in the past.

Yeah, auto-renew is a damn scam. Just use prepaid cards.

you just now reminded me i needed to cancel my renewal...and i did so through xbox.com with no problems.

That's how they get ya!

I'm not the type to let that shit fly, but there are a lot of people who will!

I don't think it's a conspiracy. it used to be much harder but that option is convenient and has worked for me in the past.

I get cheap instant codes from ShopTo. Cheaper and easier.

It probably isn't and I agree that it used to be much harder, have to give MS props for actually making the option so exposed...

I've gotten burned in the past using auto pay, and auto renewal for so many things in the past that when I re-uped for Xbox Live, I used pre paid cards, never had or heard of any problems with switching before. I also do the same with iTunes.

As far as the UK is concerned, I'm fairly certain that being able to cancel online is a recent addition. The last time I had to do it, I had to do it over the phone.

I've canceled auto-renewal four times in years past. Never had a problem.

If you just used the prepaid card it wouldn't have auto-renewed anyway.

There's no conspiracy here.

It works fine through the website, looks like you just got a random error.

In the past I've also had to call and after a couple minute long back and forth of trying to get me to stay on it the rep started hitting me with some legal jargon in terms of "You can't do this, we retain all rights to that etc etc.." and then finally took my card off. A year or so later I saw that my card was actually still in the system but since I had gotten a new card from the bank I just left it cause it wouldn't work on auto renewel anyway. Having a dead card assigned to auto renewel is actually the best possible situation.

It was my experience that cancelling auto-renewal through your Xbox doesn't work. You need to talk to a customer service representative directly to get it done for certain. Back when I had a Gold account, I tried the ways above and it would show up on my billing still. Finally, after my account was hacked, I got it taken off and haven't had a bill since. I looked around the web and was surprised to find that this method was common knowledge.