I paid $0.99 and they charged me $39: what “every 4 weeks” means and how to stop it

Checked: October 26, 2026

That dollar was a trial that rolled into a full-price subscription by itself. Do three things now: cancel on the company’s website (not in your phone, if you paid on a website), screenshot the cancellation, and email the company asking for a refund. If the charges continue, ask your bank to stop them.

What actually happened

The payment page showed $0.99 in big type and, in small type, “7-day trial, then $39.99 every 4 weeks”. You agreed to the trial, didn’t cancel within those days, and the subscription started charging on its own. From the company’s point of view, everything is by the rules. From a human point of view, the page was designed to be misread. An entire industry works this way, and very careful people get caught every day. The lesson “The trial trap” takes it apart with a clickable example.

Usually there was a long questionnaire about your goals and habits before the price. Its job is to make you invest time and feel that “your plan is ready”. That part is covered in the lesson on the long questionnaire in our free course.

What “every 4 weeks” means

“Every 4 weeks” sounds like “monthly”, but it isn’t. A year has 52 weeks, and 52 divided by 4 is 13 charges a year, not 12. The charge date also shifts earlier each time, so the payment is harder to predict and easier to miss. If the screen said $39.99 every 4 weeks, that is about $520 a year, not $480.

If you see a $0 or $1 charge that disappears from your statement after a few days, that may have been a card check, not a trial. A real trial payment stays on the statement, and a full-price charge follows it days or weeks later.

What to do now, step by step

1. Find where the subscription lives. If you paid on a website after a questionnaire, it is not in your iPhone or Google Play settings; it is with that company. See “How to cancel a subscription you bought on a website”. If you paid through the App Store or Google Play, see “How to cancel a subscription on iPhone” or “How to cancel a subscription on Google Play”.
2. Cancel and keep proof. A dated screenshot of the “subscription cancelled” screen and the confirmation email. Don’t accept a “pause” or a “discount instead of cancelling”.
3. Ask for a refund in writing. Keep it short: you signed up for a trial, never intended to continue, cancelled as soon as you saw the charge, and haven’t used the paid service. A ready text is in “Refund request letter template”.
4. If the company ignores you or refuses, you can ask your bank to dispute the charge. The bank will review it, but a refund isn’t guaranteed, and days matter more than months: “How to dispute a card charge through your bank”.
5. If charges continue after you cancelled, ask your bank to stop payments to that company or replace the card: “How to stop the charges and block your card”.

“Nobody warned me about the charge”

Card networks have rules for companies that sell trials: show the terms clearly and get your clear agreement. Under Visa’s rules, if a trial is longer than a week the company is generally expected to send a reminder about seven days before the first full charge, with a way to cancel, and online cancelling is supposed to be easy. These are rules for the company, not a right you can enforce yourself, but if you got no reminder, say so in your email to the company and in your dispute with the bank. Check your inbox and Spam first and note that nothing arrived.

You can also report the company to your country’s consumer protection agency, for example the FTC in the US (reportfraud.ftc.gov) or Citizens Advice in the UK. That alone won’t get your money back: in practice, your bank and the card networks’ rules are the faster route.

Also screenshot the payment page if it still opens: how the price is shown and where “every 4 weeks” appears. If you aren’t sure what you actually agreed to, send us the screenshot and we will tell you in plain words how much and how often you will be charged.

How not to get caught again

• Before paying, look for the words “then”, “after”, “every”, “automatically” on the page. That is where the real price is.
• If it isn’t clear how to cancel, don’t sign up. Consumer protection agencies (the FTC in the US, for example) put it simply: if it’s not clear how to cancel, walk away.
• Use a separate virtual card for trials and keep only the trial amount on it.
• Set a phone reminder for the day before the trial ends.
• Paste the site’s link into our site check before you pay: we look at how the price is shown and whether it renews by itself.

The full plan for any “they took my money” situation is in “Charged for a subscription: what to do”. And to see through pages like this at a glance, take the free course: six short lessons with clickable examples.

This is general information, not legal advice. Bank and app store rules change and differ from country to country, so check the steps in your bank’s app or with their support.