How Dropbox handles downgrades • Hacker News Board

Re: How Dropbox handles downgrades

#41

Post by bllguo » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #19

Personally, I'm done with these kind of mind hacks. While not quite in Facebook 'Your friends will miss you' territory, it still feels quite scummy. They belong to an era of the Internet where growth and retention stats trump all. Just let me cancel. Oh, and if you cancel and are over the limit and login, Dropbox will give you a nag screen and hold your files hostage till you cough up. How this is in any way an examp…

You don't even need to be over the limit to be annoyed. Recently some of my free space expired and I came close to my storage cap (but not going over). Every day I get a notification on both of my computers that I'm close to exceeding it and that I should upgrade to a paid plan. It's incredibly irritating.

Re: How Dropbox handles downgrades

#42

Post by ufmace » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 8:31 PM UTC

I'm not sure whether it's better than usual that they actually do let you cancel online, or worse that they make you drill through apparently 20 screens or so of trying to get you not to cancel, answering questions, and finding de-emphasized buttons to click on. Thinking about it, I think that's the biggest obstacle to signing up to more services - not that I'll miss the money, but that it's going to be a royal PITA to cancel when I decide to.

I should give props to Google Play's subscription system for making the cancel interface work well. I subscribed to HBO Go for a few months to watch some shows, and wanted to cancel when I was done and didn't see anything else I wanted to watch. I just clicked one button in the play store, and it cancelled the renewal right away AND also kept my access active until the end of the period I already paid for. That's much better than I expected, and I will have much less worries about subscribing to things on the Play store in the future.

But yes, please go away "retention mind hacks".

Re: How Dropbox handles downgrades

#43

Post by kristianc » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #33

notyourwork wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you rent a 2000 sqft apartment and don’t renew your lease because of price. You decide to move to a smaller apartment with cheaper rent or move back in with your parents where rents free. Can you keep your stuff in the original apartment? I don’t disagree with you but your analogy is flawed. At least Dropbox keeps your stuff to reclaim whereas a landlord would kindly shuffle it to the garbage while cleaning y…

“That nag screen is a nice way of sayig we’re still paying for your hard drive space.” i don’t remember what the nag screen says, but saying that they’re still paying for hard drive space for me would feel a bit more straightforward and genuine.

It is also a sunk cost. Dropbox has already paid for your hard disk space - they run their own data centers. Okay, there is an opportunity cost, but unless Dropbox is running really close to capacity in its data centers, it is quite a small one.

Re: How Dropbox handles downgrades

#44

Post by jessriedel » Sat, Feb 24, 2018, 3:43 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #28

scblock wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. While this is better than many services, which make it easy to upgrade on the web but impossible to cancel without a phone call, it is still user hostile.

Sometimes the phone call is a hassle, but not evil. People don’t always understand the impact on their data and talking can help. Other companies make that a black hole as well. Back in the day Vonage would put you on hold for >30 minutes. I ended up cancelling via AMEX disputed.

To be clear, the reason they make you call is to try and stop you from downgrading. The fact that there are some cases where the customer doesn't understand the impact on their data is the justification (fig leaf). You know this because if the latter risk were the same but the company couldn't stop the downgrade (e.g., the company is discontinuing the service and the customer needs to be helped on how to transfer their data to a similar competing service), the company would never offer to talk about it over the phone.

Re: How Dropbox handles downgrades

#45

Post by Doxin » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

I still love how netflix handles cancelling subscriptions. settings -> cancel subscription -> are you sure? -> done and done. Feel free to re-subscribe anytime. They'll have kept your watching progress and personal recommendations safe in the meantime.

No weird psychological tricks to get you to not cancel, just a button and a confirmation.