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Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

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Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#101

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…

It seems to be a dark pattern in the news/media industry. Even the otherwise enlightened Economist makes you CALL in order to cancel/change your subscription.

Going from a quick, precise and inexpensive communications channel to a slow, synchronous, error-prone and costly one is something that really annoys me.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#102
post #27

Amazon is the same. I just cancelled Prime yesterday. It took me four or five confirmations that yes, I want to lose the benefits. The buttons were jumping around. Sometimes the left one was for cancelling, sometimes the right one, sometimes it was a few centimeters lower. I love my Kindle, but without that my Amazon account itself would be in real danger.

Oh, heads up, you're in for a treat. Amazon will try to tack on a Prime subscription on every order you try to make from now on. They do this with a permanent full-page interstitial (not a pop-up) for ex-Prime users before the order confirmation page whose big green 'continue' button automatically one-click charges your account for a full year of Prime. You have to read down and click the tiny 'no, I don't want these benefits' blue text link in 8px font size to file your order without Prime.

I no longer shop from Amazon. The more we accept these kind of indignities, the more they will be forced on us. Let them starve, that's the most powerful message one can send.

Edit / More data points:

- One more trick up their sleeve: they will default to two-day paid shipping even when you have free shipping available, just so that you'll feel the pain (i.e. the 'worth') of Prime every time you have to pay attention in the last page, and check the right 'free shipping' radio box for every shipment in your order.

- For me, the last thing that broke the camel's back was that they were specifically sending shipments to arrive on the last day of the shipment window. As a real example, I ordered a display on Jan 7 to arrive between Jan 14 and Jan 18. They shipped it Jan 17. This is what made me notice this, and it made me look at my past orders. Turns out, they have been doing this consistently, for a while.

The purpose of a shipping window is to allow for some slack in the case shipment gets delayed, it is for shipment. If they shipped it a few days before the window, that would be fine. If they shipped it right at the beginning of the window, that would still (arguably) be fine. If you ship in a way that is aiming for as late as possible delivery, that's pretty obvious what you're trying to do.

If you're not a Prime customer, your orders might arrive as late as they can make it. They are likely doing this on purpose.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#103

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.

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.

What PayPal should do is offer a “PayPal subscriptions” product where the terms require cancellability through PayPal. So NYt and others can’t offer PayPal unless they agree, and when a user cancels through PayPal, PP agrees to send an API call to NYT notifying them.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#104

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 don’t get why NY Times gets so much grief. They are fast and friendly on the phone and usually offer to halve the bill if it’s a price thing.

Dropbox is annoying to me because I have a service that I’m overpaying for, lack basic features like search, up sell with every interaction, and make leaving tough too.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#105

Retain with pain.. The other day I tried to delete my udacity account. No button in settings, I mailed support, they asked my to mail legal (apparently they don't fwd mail..). From legal I received the following response: Hello, We are in receipt of your request to delete your account. We are sorry you want to leave the Udacity family; you will be missed. Before we can proceed with fully processing your request, we n…

This is unacceptable - if an authenticated login is good enough to change account details and sign-in info, why isn't it good enough to close an account?

I'm not an Udacity customer, and after reading your account I never will be - I loathe these scummy tactics.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#106
This seems like standard fare at almost any company. Cox communications offered me $10 lower per-month Internet when I was cancelling. I told them if they retroactively paid me the $10/month they were over-charging me for years I would stay. This finally ended their attempts to change my mind.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#107
A little over a year ago I spent days and days trying and failing to sign up for a Dropbox Business account.

The "Start free trial" button on the website literally did nothing. If I clicked it enough times, I eventually got a poorly worded error asking me to try again in 24 hours. This happened in multiple browsers. I tried many times over the course of several days with no success. I had coworkers try in case it was something specific to my machine or network. They got the same error.

I opened a support request and asked if they could help me manually open a Dropbox Business account. No, they couldn't. The best advice they were able to give me was to try clearing my browser cache and cookies (I did; it didn't help).

Finally I dug around and managed to find a link directly to a billing form, and was able to sign up by having them start billing me immediately instead of going through a free trial. I signed up for annual billing, naively assuming the per-user annual fee would be pro-rated (like Slack and most other good per-user services do) if our small company hired or lost any employees.

During the course of that year I did end up removing two users from our Dropbox Business account. Since we had already paid for the full year up front, I expected the next annual charge to reflect a pro-rated charge. But nope! The automatic renewal paid no attention to the _actual_ number of users on our account, and Dropbox charged us as if those users still existed.

Turns out the number of licenses you're billed for has to be managed manually. If you have 10 licenses and 10 users and then remove two users, that doesn't affect the license count. You have to remove two licenses manually. And if you pay up front for a year but remove two licenses halfway through the year? Too bad. No pro-rated reduced charge next year. Better be sure to predict your exact staffing numbers a year in advance next time.

Want to add a user halfway through the year when you're already at your license limit? It'll just fail with a cryptic error until you finally realize you need to first go to a different page and manually add a license. And sometimes (like literally as I type this) the Billing page you need to visit to do this is completely broken and just serves up an error that says "Oh hello. Sorry for this little hiccup."

Dropbox's core functionality works well and I have no complaints about it, but everything related to billing is so unintuitive and so frequently broken that I wonder whether they even care about it.

So yeah, I guess it doesn't surprise me that canceling is hard too.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#108
post #10

This is totally retarded - the video shows 4 clicks to cancelling the account - this is hard? The video seems like a cover for advertising the loom product to me

Eh. Loom appears to be some kind of facetime / video teleconferencing product. I wouldn't really imagine a non-competitor bothering to advertise by fake-slamming a non-competing product. Maybe I'm just lacking in imagination.

Hey CTO/co-founder here. I was surprised to hear a Loom video made it to the top of HN today. Can confirm we had no idea/part in this posting.

Also, you can think of Loom as a way to very quickly make asynchronous video messages. Whether screen sharing or just your front face.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#109

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 don’t get why NY Times gets so much grief. They are fast and friendly on the phone and usually offer to halve the bill if it’s a price thing. Dropbox is annoying to me because I have a service that I’m overpaying for, lack basic features like search, up sell with every interaction, and make leaving tough too.

> on the phone

This should be an option, not the only way to cancel.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYT at least lets you use PayPal. When I wanted to cancel I couldn't even get through to a rep, so I just switched my payment method to PayPal and then deauthorized the recurring payment from PayPal.

So much this. I LOVE paypal as a user because of it. All my subscriptions go through it and if it isn't offered via paypal, I'll reconsider. I love to see a list of all my subscriptions with the ability to unilaterally cancel my subscription at any time via PayPal... I never even contact the companies I 'unsubscribe' from... I simply remove their access to my paypal.

I've recently paid for a VPN subscription using BitCoin. When you do BitCoin there is no auto renewal and I consider it to be a good thing.

EDIT: s/now/no

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