Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard • Hacker News Board

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#31

Post by cheschire » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: 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.

just wait till you get closer to the end date of your sub. They will start harassing you on every page load of every product you look at.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#32

Post by heavymark » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

Anytime I can cancel online, in under a minute I'd consider that easy. Yes, ideally they wouldn't put all those hoops in the way, but far better than most companies that require you to call a phone number during a certain time where you have to spend forever talking to a person who has to read from a script and may get aggressive with you or have to transfer you, or call drops or they say they have cancelled but didn't go through. Like MyFico, Sirius and other big names. Hopefully Dropbox improves but I assume their pages get enough people not to cancel, than the amount of people so angered by it that they decide to never come back that it makes sense for them.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#33

Post by dependsontheq » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 10:19 PM UTC

I have been working as a ux consultant for 15 years now, there are two things that are serious problems: 1. Forcing your users into actions they don’t want to take (dark patterns) 2. Having users delete their accounts and data because you didn’t install enough hurdles on their way to the delete button

I am actually not very sure what we see here, is it a dark pattern? It could be, but at the size of Dropbox I could easily imagine the problems haveing a way of cancelling to easily could cause. Especially if we are talking about a file space.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#34

Post by shortj » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 10:20 PM UTC

I actually went through exactly this with Dropbox a couple weeks ago. It took me two tries, the first time I mis-read / fell into one of the dark patterns. I'd made up my mind long before I ever went to the website to cancel and all this did was make me grumpy and justify my decision even more. Clearly it adds to their retention numbers somewhere or it would be dropped, however I will not use dropbox again in the face of such blatant disrespect. It was a great service, but with so many other options out there I have no need to use one that thinks I need to be tricked in to staying.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#35

Post by saghm » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 10:20 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…

> 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.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#36

Post by maz1b » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

cschneid wrote: post #30

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.

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?

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#37

Post by znpy » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

Just disable automatic payments from your paypal account and/or bank or card issuer and they'll cancel it for you! EASY! /s

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#38

Post by er0k » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

This is one of the reasons I try to pay for most things with prepaid credit cards. Not only does it mitigate the risk of me having to change credit cards when their data is stolen, but it makes it very easy to cancel services, simply because there is no money left on the card for them to take.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#39

Post by sxates » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 10:23 PM UTC

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…

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

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#40

Post by jenscow » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 10:23 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: 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.

Thanks for reminding me!