Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard • Hacker News Board

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#321

Post by erikb » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 11:20 AM UTC

Don't use the form. Use the legal way to quit any contract in your country. For instance that means sending a paper letter to their offices with the postal service confirming that the letter was received. If your contract has a quitting period pay the 3 months or what. Then stop and ignore all the annoying emails and letters they send you. They will not sue, because they would lose.

Might cost you $5 for the special letter type, and might cost you 3 more monthly fees than you would be willing to pay otherwise. But this is 100% save in all countries with a working legal system. Of course if they come after you with baseball bats or car bombs, then you probably can't quit their "services" anyways. ;)

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#322

Post by chrisan » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 11:23 AM UTC

sqldba wrote: post #155

towelr34dy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just be careful with this. Some companies will treat this as if it were a bounced check and keep your debt going.

Do you have an example of this?

I'd imagine this is in the Paypal terms when the company chooses to integrate with them and that 'debt' isn't enforceable

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#323

Post by mehrdadn » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 11:31 AM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #220

zo1 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's not all peachy there either. I made the same assumption till I went to the bank to "block" a service-provider that kept insisting on billing me. They "blocked" the service-provider from charging me for 3 months, then they were apparently obligated to let it through because they could only do it for 3 months. At which point, the service-provider just back-charged me for those three months and continued anyw…

I mean I actually have the bank send checks. Is that how you had that set up?

Do you not need to worry about the mail getting lost?

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#324

Post by devdimi » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 11:33 AM UTC

I don't think this is hard, it is possible online, no phone calls nor paper communication. In Germany if you want to cancel anything, you need to send personally signed letter three full months in advance. And most of the things run as two year long contacts. If you miss the the date three months before your contact ends you get another two years automatically.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#325

Post by kevsim » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:01 PM UTC

callinyouin wrote: post #12

That looks super annoying (seems like a really good way to get zero return customers), but does anyone remember how difficult it was for people to quit AOL in the (early?) 2000's? Just search for "cancel AOL" on youtube and you will find some pretty incredible accounts of people being straight up harassed by AOL reps to keep their accounts. For some people it took hours arguing with a rep over the phone before they w…

Agree. I remember Xbox Gold was a pig to cancel back in the day as well.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#326

Post by garmaine » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:25 PM UTC

mehrdadn wrote: post #320

sakarisson wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a legal perspective, would it be enough to send them an e-mail telling them that you no longer want to subscribe to the services before pulling the plug?

Probably depends on whether you email an appropriate address?

It really doesn’t. You wouldn’t even need the email. If this ever went to court the NYT wouldn’t win. Judges are human beings, not computers, and they consider circumstances. All you have to do is demonstrate intent, and not use the service so they can’t argue you received benefit without making an attempt to cancel.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#327

Post by fnordsensei » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:29 PM UTC

makecheck wrote: post #226

Phone employees must be given drop-dead quotas or something because they really resist not being able to do their won’t-you-please-stay spiels at cancellation time, no matter what you say. Once when cancelling an AmEx card, I TOLD the agent immediately “I am cancelling my card, and I decline in advance any offers you make to keep me on this card”; she still couldn’t seem to resist interjecting about 3 or 4 time-wasti…

The agent is probably required to walk you through them. The people who have taken away the agent's power to actually make your customer experience a happy one will never directly encounter the consequences of their decisions.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#328

Post by pintxo » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 12:52 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #43

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…

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.

Could you point to the actual regulation? I have not heard about this yet.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#329

Post by mkbkn » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 1:20 PM UTC

sambucini wrote: post #22

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…

These days if I want to "delete" an account, I'll just change my email address and password associated with that account. I take help of temporary email providers. Also, I write gibberish in place of my profile data.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#330

Post by nightcracker » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 1:20 PM UTC

graedus wrote: post #4

Ha, not as hard as I expected but still like 4-5 steps with a bunch of dark patterns (highlighting the buttons that don't downgrade, etc). The screen that's like "OK, you want to downgrade, but tell us why " gave me flashbacks to that nightmare Comcast cancellation call[0]. [0] https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service

At what point can you just state something like the following?

> I am recording this phone call. I am terminating our service contract, and have communicated this by mail as well as verbally as we speak. Any further attempts to charge me for this service I have cancelled shall be disputed and reported to the police for attempted fraud. Good day.