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Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

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Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#301

Post by neya »

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…

This is a dark pattern usually dying companies like to follow. Why? Because, if you are confident of the value you provide to your customer, you don't need to be so aggressive about not letting them go. Yes, retention is an important KPI, but trust and transparency are even more important than anything else, so companies that offer little value and can't keep up with competition usually do this because they know they are dying.

A little while ago, I noticed the dark pattern that dropbox uses and showed it to my friend while talking about dark patterns. Turns out he was in charge of his university for selecting a good vendor for file storage. He saw it and immediately said 'fuck that' and went for another vendor instead. You see, this is how dark patterns shoot you in the foot - the cost of trust and transparency is even higher. In this case, dropbox lost significant money that they could have otherwise won.

Besides, In this day and age, there is literally no value that dropbox offers to its users. Their competitors offer way more value for similar price points and the experience with dropbox isn't even that good. All they have is their brand name, which will also be gone soon after they've tortured their customers with these dark patterns.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#302

Post by function_seven »

Spooky23 wrote: post #210
icelancer wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why? I’m surprised at the downvotes I got on my original comment. The Dropbox online cancellation, like many others, is a deceptive, tricky option designed to make you think that you cancelled when you did not to rip you off. Dropbox isn’t unusual. Why is a phone call so evil? It’s bizarre to me that a arguably marginal inconvenience is more noxious than active trickery.

Can you imagine a business that insisted on a phone call to begin a subscription? Like, say the NYT website had just a phone number instead of a link and a form.

That would severely reduce their circulation.

The whole reason the signup flow is done entirely online is because its simpler and more convenient for both the subscriber and the provider.

Which tells you why they don't offer the cancel flow through the same medium. Because it's too easy. They want to add friction and inconvenience to the cancellation.

It's not as bad as many gyms ("you must (snail) mail a form to our headquarters to cancel"), but it's a step in that direction.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#303

Post by dbg31415 »

If you think this sucks, have a go at deleting your Facebook account.

Worse... WhatsApp. When you change phone numbers it prompts you to notify all your friends. But when you delete, it just keeps letting friends message you without letting them know you aren't there, and all you get are notifications that people on WhatsApp are trying to contact you -- but it won't tell you anything more unless you sign up again. Before I had WhatsApp, people couldn't message me through WhatsApp, but once you had it, there's apparently no way to delete it. What if I change my phone number? Is any number in the system just forever in the system. Cool, cool cool cool.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#304

Post by sambucini »

yayadarsh wrote: post #175
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…

Thanks for this. Just opened a support case to delete my account.

fyi - given it's annoying to collect all that information, I felt udacity might actually be able to help me with that. So I filed a subject access request under GDPR and asked them to provide me with all the data they have in relation to me..

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#305

Post by sambucini »

duxup wrote: post #69
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…

Is there an option to simply not pay anymore? That sounds like a complex process to avoid deleting the wrong things, but maybe not the same for stopping a subscription?

I wasn't actually paying. The account basically dormant and from back when they started and courses were free. I am just trying to minimize my digital footprint by deleting accounts I don't actually use (I'm happy with value for money at coursera).

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#306

Post by elcomet »

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…

In France, on of the biggest journals, Le Monde, is also a hassle to unsubscribe. Subscribing is very easy, just enter credit card online. But for unsubscribing, you have to send a registered letter with recorded delivery. This is a hassle, you have to go to the post station, and is also pretty expensive (around 5-10 euros), which is almost the price for 1 month subscription to the journal. I find this unbelievable that you can't unsubscribe online (even for the online edition).

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#307

Post by NamTaf »

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

I'm so glad I have never encountered anything this bad in my life. This is truly awful.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#308

Post by throw82m2bdv »

lurquer wrote: post #209
rkagerer wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For services like that it might be easier just to get a new credit card ;-)

Be careful with this. I had a monthly charge from several vendors. Despite phone calls, letters, etc. cancelling the service, they would keep charging. So, I said, 'screw it' and got a new card. The next month -- on my new card -- the charges appeared. Turns out that Visa will honor a recurring charge even if the old card number has been cancelled. Insane. You will need to move to an entirely different type of card.…

The account number update feature can be turned off for accounts at the credit card company I work for. It must be done before the account is cancelled, though, and the setting itself is not widely known by front-line reps.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#310

Post by tmalsburg2 »

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…

NYT is a great example for mindless optimization of short-term metrics. Canceling my subscription during the 2016 presidential race was such a humiluating experience that I would never again subscribe even though I miss reading the NYT. They lost me forever.
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