Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
It cancels subscriptions you forgot
Many users find charges they never knew existed, and their reaction is that they didn't even know about them. Popular consumer fintech products surface the list and tell the user to cancel. Instinct goes the rest of the way.
It opens the subscription's site and signs in. If the site sends a confirmation to the user's email, the assistant has access to the inbox and uses it to continue. It runs through to the last screen and cancels.
Then it texts back a figure for what the cancellations save, such as $2,000 in a month.
Why are subscriptions so easy to forget?
Recurring billing charges a small amount on a schedule, so no single payment prompts a decision. Economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier studied gym members in a 2006 paper and found that people on monthly contracts paid roughly 17 dollars per visit, compared with 10 dollars for a pay-per-visit pass. They concluded that members overestimated how often they would attend. The same inattention is what makes unused subscriptions persist.
Why is cancelling harder than signing up?
Designers call interface tricks that steer users against their own interests dark patterns, a term coined by the designer Harry Brignull in 2010. One common example is a signup that takes a single click while the cancellation path runs through several screens. Brignull named a variant the roach motel, in which getting in is easy and getting out is not. Regulators in several countries have taken interest in cancellation flows.
How can software cancel for you?
Agents can drive a website the way a person does: they read the page, click buttons, fill in fields, and enter a confirmation code from an email. Browser automation tools such as Selenium have existed since 2004, but they needed a script written for each site. Language models can read an unfamiliar page and decide what to click, which removes that per-site scripting.
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