She Paid RMB 0.99 for Seven Days. The Charges Ran Nine Months.

Nine charges, found during a reconciliation

Some background. Nearly every Chinese app sells membership through a payment channel — Alipay or WeChat Pay — rather than card-on-file, so a subscription can have two separate off-switches: one inside the app, one in the payment app’s “password-free payment” settings. That detail matters later.

According to a July 2026 report in the Guangzhou paper Xinkuaibao, a woman surnamed Chen tapped a “RMB 0.99 for a seven-day trial” offer on a video-editing app in August 2025. She entered her payment password once, and that was the whole sign-up.

When the trial ended, the charges started. RMB 39 a month, billed at 1 a.m.

(Recurring charges are commonly batched overnight, so the hour is not necessarily deliberate — but it does make a charge harder to notice as it happens.)

The charges ran for nine months. At RMB 39 each, that is RMB 351 — about 355 times the 0.99 she started with.

In those nine months, she says, she opened the app twice.

She found out in May 2026, while going through a month of spending line by line. She says she never noticed any notice.

That detail is worth pausing on. What surfaced it was not an alert. It was a person sitting down and reading her own statement.

In a survey of 24 apps, 21 made auto-renewal the default

This was not one company’s habit. In that survey it was the norm.

In December 2019 the Jiangsu Consumer Council published a study of paid app memberships: 20,029 valid questionnaires online, plus hands-on testing of 24 widely used apps. Twenty-one of the 24 made auto-renewal the preselected option. Seventeen gave no notice at all before charging.

In the same survey, 69.30% of respondents had run into auto-renewal preselected by the system; only 5.58% chose it deliberately; 77.89% said money once loaded could not be refunded.

The seven years since have not been static. In April 2020 the Zhejiang Consumer Council summoned eleven audio and video platforms, including iQIYI, Tencent Video, Youku, Mango TV and Bilibili. By the 17th of that month all eleven had filed remediation responses: several said they would drop preselected auto-renewal, and all eleven said they would notify users before charging, through in-app messages, SMS or WeChat.

In May 2024 the Beijing Consumers’ Association and Beike Finance at The Beijing News ran a 632-response survey. 93.99% had been auto-renewed by an app at some point; 86.53% had met a preselected auto-renewal box when subscribing.

On disputing a charge: 65.15% said it was not easy (31.99% “very hard”, 33.16% “extremely hard”). 11.45% said it was easy.

The cancel path exists. The cost is in the taps

One thing should be said plainly first: the paths exist, and they are written into the agreements.

iQIYI’s auto-renewal terms provide for notice five days ahead, by in-app message, push or SMS. Southern Metropolis Daily tested seven platforms in July 2024 and concluded that “every platform provided a clear path to cancel auto-renewal.”

The cost is the issue.

Beike Finance at The Beijing News tested 30 Android apps in May 2024. Seven had no cancellation route inside the app at all and could only hand the user off to the payment channel. Among those that did, most took six to seven taps; the lowest was four, the highest ten. On iOS it tested ten apps: nine had an in-app path, taking between four and seven taps.

And there is the second switch. In the April 2026 test described below, turning off password-free payment for one bike-sharing app inside Alipay took nine steps on its own.

So “can it be cancelled” and “will it get cancelled” are two different questions. What keeps this business steady has less to do with the first than with the second.

Monthly users are falling. Membership revenue is not

QuestMobile data, published by 21st Century Business Herald in August 2026: in June 2026 Tencent Video had 319 million monthly active users, iQIYI 291 million, Mango TV 243 million and Youku 161 million — all four down year on year by varying margins.

(Mango TV appears again in the next section. It was the one app, out of ten tested in April, that did not preselect auto-renewal.)

iQIYI’s first quarter of 2026: total revenue RMB 6.23 billion, down 13% year on year; membership services revenue RMB 4.20 billion, up 2% quarter on quarter, and 67.4% of total revenue. For full-year 2025, membership revenue was RMB 16.81 billion, down 5%, and 61.6% of the total.

Bilibili reported 25.71 million premium members as of the end of the second quarter of 2026, up 9% year on year, with roughly 80% on annual or auto-renewing plans.

The monthly-user and financial figures in this section come from these companies’ own filings and third-party statistics. The named test in the next section covers what the membership purchase pages looked like on one day, April 11. The 24-app survey in the previous section was conducted in 2019 and named no one; its finding about giving no notice before charging does not point at any company mentioned in this section. Three sets of material, three different dates, scopes and subjects — I am not stacking them on top of each other.

Fewer people. Membership revenue holding up.

The industry describes this with a different vocabulary: stickiness, willingness to pay, content value validated. The gist is that a high renewal rate means a good product. That is my paraphrase of how such results tend to be discussed, not a quote from any company.

Someone who decides each year to buy another year, and someone who ticked a box once and has had money taken monthly ever since, are the same line in a financial statement. They are not the same thing.

The first is a product working. The second is a default holding.

How much of it is a decision renewed each year, and how much is simply nobody cancelling, is not something a financial statement shows.

Chen opened that app twice in nine months. In any platform’s renewal count, an account like hers and an account someone uses daily are both a 1.

A RMB 6,000 fine, and a $2.5 billion one

China’s Internet Platform Pricing Rules took effect on April 10, 2026 — issued in December 2025 by the National Development and Reform Commission, the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Cyberspace Administration, with a five-year term. Article 20 includes this:

Where platform operators and operators on platforms charge by way of automatic renewal or automatic deduction, they shall, before each deduction, prominently remind and notify the consumer of the deduction time, the amount and the means of cancellation, and shall allow the consumer to cancel automatic renewal and automatic deduction at any time.

The rules are not idle. From December 2025 to March 2026 the three agencies had major platforms run self-inspections against them; one of the four areas was “correcting how automatic renewal and password-free payment are presented.” On April 10 the NDRC reported that spot checks since March showed platform pricing behaviour had clearly improved, while noting that some platforms still fell short on displaying pricing and promotion rules, and had been told to fix it.

The day after the rules took effect, on April 11, Red Star Capital Bureau (Chengdu Economic Daily) tested the membership purchase pages of ten apps: iQIYI, Baidu Netdisk, Bilibili, Quark, Mango TV, QQ Music, Tencent Video, Weibo, NetEase Cloud Music and Youku.

On nine of them — every one except Mango TV — the preselected membership plan had the user agreeing to auto-renewal and password-free payment by default. Mango TV was the exception in that test: its preselected option was a RMB 99 annual card, with no auto-renewal or password-free payment attached.

That is a snapshot of one day, April 11. Five months have passed. I have not retested any of them.

Now the price of breaking the rule. In 2025 the market regulator in Shanghai’s Fengxian district penalised the operator of a lending app: signing up ticked the auto-renewal box, and no notice of any kind was given before charging, contrary to Article 10 of the Regulations for Implementing the Consumer Rights Protection Law. A warning, and a fine of RMB 6,000.

Across the Pacific, in August and September of the same year: the FTC and Amazon settled over Prime’s sign-up and cancellation flows for $2.5 billion ($1 billion civil penalty plus $1.5 billion in refunds to consumers); Match Group, $14 million; Chegg, $7.5 million. A settlement is not a court finding of liability.

What separates RMB 6,000 from $2.5 billion is not only the exchange rate.

How she found out

Back to Chen. Nobody told her. She found it herself, on a day in May 2026, going through a month of spending and seeing those nine charges of RMB 39.

Subscriptions are least trouble when nobody reads the statement.

C+R Research surveyed 1,000 American consumers in 2022. Asked to estimate their monthly subscription spending from memory, they said $86. Adding up the actual bills gave $219 — an underestimate of about 60%. 74% said it was easy to forget a monthly recurring charge, and 42% admitted they had at some point forgotten a subscription they were no longer using but were still paying for.

So the useful part is short.

Check both switches. The app’s own subscription page is one; the payment channel is the other — on iPhone under Settings → Apple Account → Subscriptions, and in Alipay and WeChat under password-free payment in the payment settings. Once a year is enough.

Reconcile once a month. Not the large amounts — the small ones you cannot name. What is strange is never the RMB 39 by itself. It is the ninth RMB 39 in a row.

Before a trial, think about what is attached. The expensive part was never the 0.99. It was the default behind it.

Chen’s first charge was RMB 0.99. Her last was the RMB 39 in month nine.

Of the eight in between, not one got her attention.