Yorba CEO Chris Zeunstrom on Canadian Expansion and How Companies Keep Consumers Hooked

People have long sought to declutter their homes. A more recent trend is doing the same with their online lives. Yorba helps them do that while offering benefits like money savings, improved online security, and a cleaner email inbox.

Yorba has expanded into Canada. The company has linked with most major Canadian banks to allow users to receive alerts about upcoming expenses and cancel and monitor subscriptions. A $6 monthly subscription offers these advanced features with a free option.

CEO Chris Zeunstrom said 73% of Canadians admit to signing up for a free or low-priced service, only to forget to cancel before the price rises, while two-thirds admit to forgetting about subscriptions they still pay for.

Folks everywhere also underestimate how much they spend on such subscriptions. While we think we have four, we actually have eight. We estimate spending an average of $86 per month when the actual tab is $219.

Zeunstrom said it’s not a fair fight. Many apps and websites deploy “dark patterns,” tactics designed to first attract and then keep consumers spending. They make it easy to register and hard to quit. Cancellation processes are often hard to find and cumbersome to complete. Often, we must call a help center even though we registered online. If we endure the long wait and reach a real person, we are rewarded with various pressure tactics to stay.

Yorba also locates and deletes unused accounts. Zeunstrom said this appeals to the growing trend toward digital minimalism, where people seek a reduced online presence. One reason is reducing one’s vulnerability to security breaches. Another is to prevent companies from using personal data to train AI models, something more firms have changed their privacy policies to allow.

“The older an account is or, the less you don’t need it, it doesn’t just die off,” Zeunstrom said. “Data that’s in there is now being used to train algorithms and AI and resold to you. People understand that now and trying to tie up loose ends a little bit more these days than they would have before ChatGPT.

“If you read the fine print, they can basically do whatever they want with (your data).”

Managing email is also tilted against the individual. Perhaps someone completes an online dinner reservation. Their email may be forwarded to the account of a holding company that owns five other chains. Suddenly, that email is on six lists.

One of those companies clones its database to send out seven alerts per week from seven unique databases. Now the email is on 13. That’s before several of those databases are sold to other companies. Yorba helps users navigate that maze.

The idea for Yorba came when Zeunstrom was with a previous company. Managing recurring spending was unnecessarily complicated. The company was exposed to data breaches.

Zeunstrom and co-founders David Schmudde and Nolan Cabeje want to keep Yorba laser-focused on helping consumers. It’s a public benefit corporation completely bootstrapped by the founders. They have turned down funding offers before and will do so again.

Thanks to mergers and bundling, subscriptions are even harder to track today. Zeunstrom said many people pay twice for the same channel. Watch closely to see which channels you are paying for. Don’t expect your cable company to tell you you’re double-billed.

“If you’re paying a certain price for Disney+, you get ESPN in the United States,” Zeunstrom said. “But many people still have an ESPN subscription and Disney+ because when they bought it, it wasn’t bundled together, but now it is.”

Auto-renewals are another tricky one. Many companies automatically sign users up for it, which makes it hard to remove. They don’t say when the renewal date is, and once it’s passed, don’t allow refunds.

When registering, users connect their email inboxes. Yorba scans two years of emails to identify logins, mailing lists and data breaches associated with the address. Via Plaid, Yorba connects to the user’s bank account. They don’t access the data but use natural language processing to run scripts and search for keywords indicative of recurring transactions. Alerts are sent when recurring payments, whether that be Netflix or the mortgage, arise. A cancellation option is provided.

Zeunstrom believes society is nearing the end of the era of surveillance capitalism as a dominant business model. Folks are more aware of how companies use their data and are even willing to pay so their data is NOT resold.

Companies are also watching closely. Bot activity artificially inflates numbers, as does the increasing number of accounts associated with dead people. Why don’t companies delete such accounts? Stats, Zeunstrom responds. They can tell advertisers they have access to X accounts even though 20% aren’t buying anything anymore.

“We’ve used car analogies before,” Zeunstrom concluded. “That gunk builds up until eventually it becomes unusable. I think that we’re headed towards that for sure.”



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