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Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

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Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#81

Post by username223 »

maz1b wrote: post #36
cschneid wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that this is not cancelling, and some companies can and will sell your bad debt to collection agencies. You don't get out of contracts just by ghosting on them.

Can you expand further on this?

This is no joke. If you get tired of dealing with an annoying Comcast "customer retention specialist"[1] and simply stop paying and stop using their service, they'll keep charging you for awhile, then sell the bill to a collections agency. This hurts your credit rating, and can have all sorts of side effects and take years to repair. It sucks, but it's how things are.

[1] https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#82

Post by jonahx »

svv wrote: post #67
mrspeaker wrote: post #8

If it's harder to leave than it is to join, then I'm not using your stuff. It's mildly condescending and very transparent and so I don't want/need to deal with it. If you believed in your product, you wouldn't do it. I subscribed to the New York Times with a simple one-step "put in your credit card deets". One year later I was going to leave the country so tried to cancel it. After several steps of forms you get the…

I've cancelled by NYTimes subscription just a few months ago. Didn't have to do any phone calls-- just answered a few questions in the chat, right there on their website.

> just answered a few questions in the chat

there is no "just" about that...

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#83

Post by JesseWright »

faitswulff wrote: post #25
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

privacy.com is probably what you want. You're making it a pain in the butt to cancel? That card is no longer valid.

So how easy is it to cancel privacy.com?

I use Privacy.com but haven't had to cancel. You don't pay for the service, as they make their money in adding as a credit-card company and charging merchants fees (or something to that effect). The trade-off is that I had to give them access to my bank account, which would likely make it much more difficult to cut them off if it came to it.

It's extremely useful though, and they say all the right words when it comes to their revenue and their management of user data. The way I see it: they're basically a credit-card company that gives you much finer control of your online payments; they could probably screw me over, but so could my actual credit-card company. They at least make it harder for other companies to screw me over.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#84

Post by GordonS »

post_break wrote: post #20

It's annoying as hell. Dropbox deleted 50,000 files on our dropbox business account once. I had to go in an manually undelete each folder. There were hundreds of folders. Poof, suddenly gone. After that we were done, had to go through these hoops to cancel.

I used to use Dropbox for syncing between machines, and had to do the same thing a few years ago. Utterly insane that you still have to manually undelete folders one-by-one. Also insane was the crap customer support (not sure if it's better for business accounts?) - it was all forum based, and you were lucky to get a response. In this case I did get a response, saying that one of the machines hooked up to the account must have deleted the files due to a conflict (it most certainly did not, and I'd said as much in my original post).

Aside from this I had 2 other problems with Dropbox:

1. On startup, it would render my machine unusable for over 1 hour. Now, it was syncing from 5400 RPM spinning rust, but still - there are good solutions that don't require hashing every file on the drive with the crappest and slowest possible hash implementation (USN change journal, file system minifilters).

2. Despite only syncing between 2 machines, there were frequent, unexplained 'sync conflicts' that resulted in duplicate copies of file (or sometimes data loss). These conflicts were not even discoverable in the Dropbox UI - you'd only see them if you looked in the folder and say the extra 'conflict' files

Oh, and they sent me a ridiculous number of emails after cancelling my Pro account. I cancelled in March 2016, and they regularly spammed me until October 2018. Only some of the emails I received over that time included an 'unsubscribe' link, and despite using those I did get, they didn't stop the emails - pretty scummy behaviour.

So, poor product, poor customer service, and scummy tactics. Not their biggest fan...

Nowadays I use Seafile, hosted in a Docker container on a low-powered Azure VM, backed by Azure Bloc Storage. Works flawlessly, and I highly recommend it. I understand this isn't a solution for the general population, but if you're technically minded (this is HN; you are), it's really easy to setup. You can use VM-mounted disks or AWS API-compatible block storage (Azure Blob Storage isn't, but I have another container running Minio, which acts as a proxy between the Azure API and Azure Blob Storage - it was plug-and-play, just working OOTB)

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#85

Post by tormeh »

distances wrote: post #59
kuschku wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s harder to leave than to join, then it’s also illegal in the EU. You have to be able to cancel through the same medium through which you can subscribe (so if you can subscribe through email, then unsubscribing only through snail mailing a letter is illegal), and it can’t be an unreasonable effort. I’m very interested what the consumer protection agencies in the EU have to say about this.

This is definitely not the case in Germany, unless there has been a very recent change in legislation. There are lots of scummy companies in Germany that make you fax/email copies of official ID to unsubscribe, even if joining was possible with a click of a button.

I'd say that this is more common than not. Fax/mail is the standard among the telecoms.

That said, I'm trying really hard to buy internet from Deutsche Telekom right now without much success, so it might just be that they're really struggling to make anything work at all, and they prioritize selling. I don't know how Germany got here. It's just absolutely insane at this point.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#86

Post by copperx »

post_break wrote: post #20

It's annoying as hell. Dropbox deleted 50,000 files on our dropbox business account once. I had to go in an manually undelete each folder. There were hundreds of folders. Poof, suddenly gone. After that we were done, had to go through these hoops to cancel.

Did you contact them to have them do the work, instead of doing it yourself? I mean, that's why you pay, to have support.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#87

Post by yholio »

stickfigure wrote: post #71
saghm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A statement under penalty of perjury that all information in your request is truthful and that this is your User Account or that you have the authorization to make the request on behalf of the owner of the User Account That strikes me as really extreme. If I had an Udacity account and someone tried to delete it, I would be annoyed, but I wouldn't seek to press criminal charges against them.

Is that even plausible? Not being government, I can't just declare "Anyone who lies to me is committing perjury, nyah nyah!"

IANL but I think it's perjury to lie in a declaration "under penalty of perjury" only if that declaration is specifically required under the law or if you are submitting it to a legal body, such as a court, or to achieve an expressly defined legal outcome. For example, the DMCA specifically requires such a declaration when making a complaint, so private parties can require it and you could face criminal prosecution for lying.

On the other hand, I have no idea what legal justification could Udacity claim. It's probably bogus.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#88

Post by aurea »

mrspeaker wrote: post #8

If it's harder to leave than it is to join, then I'm not using your stuff. It's mildly condescending and very transparent and so I don't want/need to deal with it. If you believed in your product, you wouldn't do it. I subscribed to the New York Times with a simple one-step "put in your credit card deets". One year later I was going to leave the country so tried to cancel it. After several steps of forms you get the…

The daily Washington Post crosswords are a nice free alternative.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#89

Post by the_watcher »

That's definitely over the top (particularly the second "please look at this list of things you're losing" after what looks like a feedback collection page), but it's orders of magnitude easier than cancelling a typical cable/phone/internet subscription or gym membership.

My concern is that companies like Dropbox will eventually learn that the reason the companies that are famously hard to end a relationship with are that way is because, in the end, you make more money that way.

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