As a customer, I expect a vendor to honor a few basic “inalienable rights”. Tell me what you’re going to charge me before you do it. Keep clear records showing what you’ve charged me in the past. Is it really so much to ask?
Audible seems to think so.
The Mysterious Missing Membership Charges
I’m not a huge audiobook listener, so I don’t subscribe to Audible’s annual plan. Occasionally, when they have a promotion or I see a book I absolutely want in audiobook form, I’ll activate a membership. Often, it’s a deal like, “Get 3 months of Audible Premium Plus for $0.99/month.” After the promo is over, the monthly price returns to $14.95 (or whatever the current price is).
That first month, I’m excited to grab an audiobook I want at a great discount. The second month, I probably haven’t even listened to the first book yet, so I see the email notifying me of another credit on my account but don’t take any action.
By the third month, I’ve forgotten when exactly I signed up, how long the promo lasts, and how much it’s going to cost me to keep the membership at its current level.
So I log into my Audible account and look at my purchase history for clues. Say it’s March 2025 and this is what I see:
Weird. I just got an email today saying I have another credit added to my account, but there’s no charge for it. No charges since January–and it’s not even a charge, it’s just the use of a credit. Where are the charges?
So I use the navigation menu and go to:
- Membership Details
- Payments
- Settings
- Credit Summary
None of these places list the membership charges for the past couple of months. Membership Details tells me I’m on the Audible Premium Plus membership, I have 2 credits, my next bill date is in April, and the date I first became a customer. Payments just lists my credit card associated with the account. Settings is just my email address, password, and language preference. Credit Summary shows that I was issued a credit in February and another in March.
Where. Are. The. Charges?!?
Given my past history with Amazon hiding the information related to my purchase history, I decide to check their Help pages to look for clues. I don’t find anything. So I search the internet. I find several Reddit threads going back several years complaining about the same problem: people signed up for an Audible promo and could not figure out when it was ending. One person said check the original email from Audible for details about the promotion. Ah, good idea!
So I checked the email. It was from January. Subject line: “Your order is confirmed.” Inside it said, “Welcome to Audible” and showed a 99 cent membership charge and one book exchanged for one credit.
Nothing about the main body of the email made it clear it was a promotion, but the charges listed a discount. And at the bottom of the email was some fine print.
Profit by Obscurity
Nothing in the email said how long the promotion (or “trial period”?) would last. Nothing told me what I would be charged the following month. As I searched my emails, I found another email from February saying I’d gained one credit and would be charged again (no amount listed) in March. And that brings us back to the email I got today:
None of these emails list how much they charged me, or how much they intend to charge me. They only tell me that I’ve gained another credit on my account. At this point I had a choice to make:
- Give up and let Audible charge me whatever and whenever they want to and THEN I’ll get my answer.
- Spend another unknown amount of time and see if I can get customer service to tell me the answer.
When a company makes it difficult to get BASIC information like this, they are deliberately placing obstacles in the way of their customers in the hopes that we’ll just let them keep charging us. If we don’t see HOW MUCH we are paying every month, we won’t be tempted to cancel the service.
(One might argue that it’s underhanded of me, as the customer, to take advantage of a promotional deal and then cancel before being charged full price. But it’s not. If they didn’t want to offer me the option, then they shouldn’t have made the deal. They state right up front that I “must cancel” before the end of the promo period to avoid future charges, so it’s legitimately part of our agreement together.)
But I’m not going to fall for this sort of psychological tactic. When a company makes something difficult that should be one of my rights as a customer, I don’t give up–I dig in my heels and wrestle one of their customer service reps until they cry uncle. So I clicked Audible’s 24/7 Contact Us to talk to their customer service support team. (Spoiler: There is no support team.)
When I selected “Chat”, I ended up in chatbot hell. It presented options that were the same options listed under other topics like Membership, Returns, etc, even though I’d just selected “Something Else” and “Topic not listed”. It would list 2-3 items that were not my issue and then offer to “End Chat” or “Never Mind”. I tried “Never Mind” but it would just loop around and offer the same things that weren’t my issue. I was never given an opportunity to chat with a human.
(Sure, I could have tried a phone call, but I have other things going on in my house and didn’t want to be stuck on the phone. At least with a chat, I can multitask.)
Out of desperation, I turned to my main Amazon account’s chat help. They have always been knowledgeable and helpful, and maybe they would be able to help, since Audible is an Amazon company.
Amazon Chat helped with my Audible account!
It was amazing. Amazon’s help chat was able to help me with the question. It did take a little bit of a wait, because they needed to get authorization or help from their “Lead”. But they did give me the answer to the first question, along with a link to the Audible Help page on Purchase History options.
How to Find Audible Membership Charges in my Purchase History
And there they were! The missing charges!
This is where I feel a little sheepish for missing such an obvious step in my search for answers. If I had just checked the dropdown menu, I may have noticed “Membership charges”. Instead, I saw the word “View” and “Your Orders” and assumed that any payments I’d made would be listed. My bad.
But the real “bad”, in my opinion, is how Audible/Amazon deliberately hides basic transactional information in their interfaces. The fact that my article on tracking down Amazon charges is the single most popular post on my little website just shows how many other people have trouble finding that Transactions tab. That an obscure Reddit conversation is one of the first page answers when I searched on Google is the reason I decided to write up this post. I hope it helps you.
And if it does, I hope you’ll consider contributing a few bucks to my next audiobook purchase.
Audible, You Suck
Sadly, even the Amazon chat team couldn’t effectively answer my second Audible billing question: What will I be charged on my next bill date?
The chat rep stated that my next charge would be $7.95. But there’s no membership listed at that price. I pushed back and reminded them that the lowest price on the membership list was $9.99. They said, “Oh, yes, that’s what it is when you add the taxes.” Hmmm.
They were still wrong, though. The membership I have is the next level up–Audible Premium Plus, which is actually $14.95/month + taxes. And given the fine print in the email excerpt above, I expect that will be the amount charged on the April bill date. But I shouldn’t have to sleuth around and GUESS to get that information.
Any company offering a subscription membership service should clearly list the next charge date AND AMOUNT on the account.
Audible, you’ve got some growing up to do, dude. Cuz right now, you suck.
Meanwhile, I’ve got a few more helpful tips up my sleeve before you go.
Managing Audible Promotions & Other Billing Tips
Save your emails from Audible! When you sign up for that Audible promo, keep the email in your archive. That way you can at least search and see when it started. The most common promotion is a 3-month deal. So if your order confirmation showing that first $0.99 (or whatever discount) is in January, then your last discounted rate will be in March.
Put a reminder on your calendar. When you activate that Audible deal, drop a reminder on your personal calendar on a date just before the promotion ends with details about it. I use Google Calendar, and if I suddenly wonder, “Hey, when is my Audible promo ending?” I can do a search (using the dropdown to search past and future dates) for “Audible” and see my reminder and any details I chose to include.
Side Note: Default payment method isn’t shared between Audible and Amazon. A little side note in a Reddit thread noted that when someone’s credit card expired and they put the new card on their Amazon account, they didn’t realize they’d have to do that separately on their Audible account. And Audible didn’t even email them when their membership expired and couldn’t renew. It just ended and stopped giving them credits. Perhaps that’s been fixed since 2022, but just case, I thought I’d mention it.
Check out Audible’s Billing Issues help page for more info.
Bonus: How to Keep the Audiobooks You Paid For: Saving Audible Titles as MP3 with OpenAudible
A while back I got frustrated when audiobooks I’d paid for were unavailable unless I had an active membership with Audible. Those books should be mine to enjoy forever after, not just when my Audible app was connected to the internet with an active membership.
I found a great app called OpenAudible that will convert your Audible titles into MP3 files that you can archive and use offline any time you like. It has a pretty decent feature set, like saving a book as one long MP3 or breaking it into chapters as separate “tracks”. I’ve been using it for a while and feel so much better knowing that the money I invested into my audiobooks won’t be wasted or lost if Audible goes out of business or decides to remove one of the books from my Audible library.
Disclaimer: I make no guarantees about this OpenAudible app and if you click to follow my link you’re agreeing that the risk is all yours and I’m not liable for anything that happens. I am not encouraging piracy, only offering an option for you to keep what you paid for.
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