Live data from Hacker News

Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

useloom.com

211–220 of 412 posts

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also like to add that despite the negative publicity PayPal gets from the merchant side, it's also preferred over credit cards by merchants for better handling of "disputes". Some consider paypal to be archaic, but it's bleeding edge payment tech when placed alongside traditional credit cards.

Years ago I used PayPal to pay for an on demand server that was advertised to be ready within an hour. Twenty four hours and zero servers later, I had already gone to a competitor and asked for a refund. The company refused and PayPal sided with them. American Express sided with me. I closed my PayPal account forever that day. Now we have even better tools available for subscriptions. Check out privacy card.

The privacy card privacy policy isn't very comforting. I assume its partially boilerplate but it did keep me from signing up a while ago

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#212

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.

Other than PayPal monetizing your payment history, sure it’s great. Apple makes it even easier. This is tangential, but on the topic of PayPal and privacy, this article is interesting about PayPal and HIPAA: https://simple.icouch.me/blog/is-paypal-hipaa-compliant-revi... Short answer: if privacy matters, PayPal is a non-starter. I don’t want news publishers to have my information either. I know publishers like to how…

What is the alternative? Is, what do informed people do instead of using credit cards or PayPal to buy things? (I assume stripe is the same)

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#213
post #135
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you determine how easy it is to leave before you actually need to do it? Before even signing up?

This tool is highly useful: https://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/ It ranks hundreds of websites from "easy" to "impossible".

Could gdpr endanger sites like this? Actually curious

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#214

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…

This happened to me too with NYT. 20 minutes on the phone with some poor woman whose compensation I'm sure depended in part on convincing me not to cancel. I was really surprised because they generally have a good reputation as an organization. I'll never let them get their hands on my payment details again.

Thanks for sharing, I will avoid them for sure. I periodically get tempted.

I found canceling MIT tech and the Atlantic to be painless btw

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#215
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which provider?

It was PIA - PrivateInternetAccess. I first tried ExpressVPN and for privacy I'd recommend ExpressVPN because they located in a place with no data retention laws. However PIA has port forwarding support and that is crucial for my case.

Both support payment via Bitpay. ExpressVPN returned the money no problem after I've discovered that they don't do port forwarding.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#216
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…

Amazon restarted my prime subscription without my consent. I definitely cancelled it and left it canceled for months. I think they auto renewed it when I bought something? No idea. Very dishonest

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#217
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which provider?

I'm sure there are many more, but Mullvad is one VPN provider accepting bitcoin payments (as well as cash).

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#218
post #137

if it takes more than 30min to cancel a service/account i just call my bank, explain the situation and reject all future transactions from that merchant.

Can you run into legal issues with this? If the company still thinks youre using the product/service but not paying? I would like to know because i want to use this strategy.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#219
post #188

Call your CC, claim inability to reach business to cancel and request chargeback. This is my action plan #1 when vendor start irritating me with their support or policies.

Seems like a great way for the vendor to send you debt to collections.

What you said is more applicable to gym memberships or cell phone contracts where you actually sign in-person multi-page agreement for 1-2 years conscious slavery.

CC chargebacks works just fine for any online business that try to pull a quick one on you and making it artificially hard to cancel/unsubscribe/change services.

Most people choose to spend 1-2 hours online try to get hold of someone "who can solve your problem". You CC service dept can do it faster for you by transferring the problem to the other side.

I mean - it's always fair to try to solve problem by contracting vendor to have them to honor your legitimate request first. If that doesn't help [quickly and painlessly enough] - then there is a plan B in place.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#220
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same reason I pay bills via my bank bill pay rather than giving EFT access to the folks who send me bills. One point of control, and the bank is invented to help me with payment issues rather than throw up roadblocks.

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?
Post reply on HN