How Dropbox handles downgrades | Hacker News Reader

How Dropbox handles downgrades

userflowpro.com

69 pointskhuknows43 comments

Personally, I'm done with these kind of mind hacks.

While not quite in Facebook 'Your friends will miss you' territory, it still feels quite scummy.

They belong to an era of the Internet where growth and retention stats trump all. Just let me cancel.

Oh, and if you cancel and are over the limit and login, Dropbox will give you a nag screen and hold your files hostage till you cough up.

How this is in any way an example of good practice is beyond me.

Agreed, this is a horrible practice. I've a free account that's never getting upgraded now!

What if you rent a 2000 sqft apartment and don’t renew your lease because of price. You decide to move to a smaller apartment with cheaper rent or move back in with your parents where rents free. Can you keep your stuff in the original apartment?

I don’t disagree with you but your analogy is flawed. At least Dropbox keeps your stuff to reclaim whereas a landlord would kindly shuffle it to the garbage while cleaning your old apartment.

That nag screen is a nice way of sayig we’re still paying for your hard drive space.

“That nag screen is a nice way of sayig we’re still paying for your hard drive space.”

i don’t remember what the nag screen says, but saying that they’re still paying for hard drive space for me would feel a bit more straightforward and genuine.

It is also a sunk cost. Dropbox has already paid for your hard disk space - they run their own data centers. Okay, there is an opportunity cost, but unless Dropbox is running really close to capacity in its data centers, it is quite a small one.

The fact that Dropbox DOESN'T throw the data away makes the point that they are taking your data hostage as leverage to get you to pay, and maybe even pay more over time.

As for your own analogy, if you abandon your property during an eviction the landlord's only option would be to dump it as there is no incentive to take the property as a means to recoup losses. Dropbox should just do the same or provide some mechanism for permanent deletion on cancelation or else the data hostage stigma will remain.

Edit: I also agree that this is one of the worse forms of dark patterns that subpar marketing teams force their engineers to implement.

You don't even need to be over the limit to be annoyed. Recently some of my free space expired and I came close to my storage cap (but not going over). Every day I get a notification on both of my computers that I'm close to exceeding it and that I should upgrade to a paid plan. It's incredibly irritating.

I think the core problem is that you lose that available space even if you paid out through the month/year. I have a suspicion this is an intentional dark pattern to keep people from downgrading and not some weird engineering constraint. So it’s a bad and maybe unethical user experience.

Why couldn’t it be: “Thank you for using Dropbox, you have access to your 1t (or whatever) until X date, after that your files will stop syncing unless you do Y. Come back any time!”

So if I pay for a year, then cancel 6 months in, I lose my 1tb immediately?

Do they give you a pro-rated refund for canceling? Otherwise (unless I'm misunderstanding your comment) that seems like they aren't giving you what you paid for.

Yes, or at least that was my experience a few months ago. I’d have to check if anything changed.

"In most cases, canceling your Plus or Professional subscription before it expires means you'll finish your current subscription without receiving money back. Once the subscription expires, your Dropbox will revert to a Basic account, and you will no longer have the additional storage quota or features granted by the Plus upgrade."

https://www.dropbox.com/help/billing/plus-refund

I'm on the monthly plan, and never really make use of it so this post made me decide to cancel. My interface went completely back to the Dropbox Personal style, but it says I still have my 1TB until March 7th (which is when my subscription would have renewed).

That's super messed up if it's true...Usually when you pay for a yearly plan and stop paying, that "plan" continues till it expires at which point the service will stop working for you. That's not even hard to really implement - maybe a few weeks or a month of work considering Dropbox hires pretty talented engineers and solve much more complicated problems.

Audible has something similar: they require that you use up all your credits before cancellation is even possible, so that is obstacle #1. Then they ask for reason and sub-reason, and give you either a $20 coupon if you say the reason is because it's too expensive, or a 3 months praise on your account if you say you can't catch up to one book a month.

Pretty clever. But having to choose 6 books immediately at the point of cancellation sucks

Yeah, they tried to do this to me so I complained to support and they refunded all my credits. At least their support staff treat you right, if not their software.

I cancelled my New York Times digital subscription this year. It required a phone call and talking to two individuals. Of course I couldn't do it the very first time I tried because I wasn't in a position to make a phone call at the time.

I find Dropbox's approach middle of the road. I think the thing that annoys me the most is that the button that does what you are specifically trying to do is de-emphasized. It shows a lack of respect.

FYI, Apple and Google both now resell subscriptions to various newspapers. And unlike this case, you can unsubscribe from them without having to call anyone.

It is also interesting how the handle forced downgrades. I just lost some GBs from previous promotions (like Dropbox Campus Cup) and are now stuck with the following situation:

- all files are still there, downloads are possible

- they disabled syncing between devices and sharing

- in case of upgrading to a paid plan I can continue as before

I can't really imagine a better solution though. Is there any grace period? I assume you can delete files and directories to get below your quota.

I remember still being able to delete files and synch those changes. So that should be no problem.

Thank you for posting this. I have been putting off downgrading my Dropbox account because I thought it would be painful. Now I'll just go do it.

I'm not sure whether it's better than usual that they actually do let you cancel online, or worse that they make you drill through apparently 20 screens or so of trying to get you not to cancel, answering questions, and finding de-emphasized buttons to click on. Thinking about it, I think that's the biggest obstacle to signing up to more services - not that I'll miss the money, but that it's going to be a royal PITA to cancel when I decide to.

I should give props to Google Play's subscription system for making the cancel interface work well. I subscribed to HBO Go for a few months to watch some shows, and wanted to cancel when I was done and didn't see anything else I wanted to watch. I just clicked one button in the play store, and it cancelled the renewal right away AND also kept my access active until the end of the period I already paid for. That's much better than I expected, and I will have much less worries about subscribing to things on the Play store in the future.

But yes, please go away "retention mind hacks".

None of this is "good". User wants to downgrade, let them downgrade without asking a bunch of questions and clicking next 5 times.

I still love how netflix handles cancelling subscriptions. settings -> cancel subscription -> are you sure? -> done and done. Feel free to re-subscribe anytime. They'll have kept your watching progress and personal recommendations safe in the meantime.

No weird psychological tricks to get you to not cancel, just a button and a confirmation.

My interpretation: “no big deal, not scummy, better than average by a distance”. And: please buy userflowpro.

I feel the downgrade flow could still be shorter (fewer steps) without affecting the amount of information provided on the downgrade or the level of influencing that happens in these screens to get the user to stay.

Off topic, but I wonder how much money they are not getting by offering a lower priced tier of like 5$ per month?

This is a deliberate pricing decision. They would lose money on people switching to the cheaper plan, who were otherwise willing to pay a higher price but not use the full plan's potential.

The only thing I remember being significantly cheaper for personal storage is actually Office365, which is $50-100/year (depending on how you are at looking for discounts) for either 1TB or 5TB (as 5x1TB).

Edit: summary cropped from a recent discussion where someone said "[Ewww Microsoft]"

Dropbox: $99/year for 1TB - or $199/year if I want "Smart Sync" which is the same basic thing as [OneDrive's] Files On Demand.

Google Drive: $99/year for 1TB, unclear if it supports the same kind of online-only files.

Box.com, but I could only get 100GB of storage for $10/month; for more I'd need to have 3+ accounts on their Business plan at $15/month/account.

Sugarsync, 250GB for $10/month or 500GB for $19/month.

SpiderOak ONE, known for security & encryption, $9/month for 400GB or $12/month for 2TB.

OwnCloud, free except for buying a NAS or setting up and powering an always-on home server to run it (or paying for online storage and a hosted VM), along with my time dinking around with it and troubleshooting.

Something based on some kind of S3 clients. See above about my time setting it up, dinking around with it and troubleshooting. Also, using the Cloudberrylab backup software calculator, storing and accessing 600GB in S3 would cost at least $13-14/month.

Wow, dropbox made it long and annoying to give them less money. Verdict : I love it!

How Dropbox makes customers jump through sales hoops before doing what they actually want.

True, but clicking the button is still easy
What is not clear is what happens if you're using more than 2GB of space and downgrade

It's shown in that screenshot in the "Overcoming your objection" section of the article, next to the fish tank graphic:
"If you've already reached your quota, this means that: * Your Dropbox will stop syncing * You won't be able to add any new files to your Dropbox * You can't restore any files removed from your Dropbox"

I was expecting more description of the data workflow.
I tested a bit as it’s not completely described and it seems like you don’t lose data, but can’t write unless you upgrade again.

Agreed. While this is better than many services, which make it easy to upgrade on the web but impossible to cancel without a phone call, it is still user hostile.

I ended up having to make a similar flow for subscription cancellation. We've been spending lots of time removing obstacles to subscribe. CEO got a brilliant idea to hire a call center and require call-to-cancel.
After weeks of "debate" we settled on a 5 page "are you sure?" "are you super duper sure?" "Everyone loves you and will miss you. are you sure?" with confusing buttons "Cancel" cancels your subscription deactivation process (subscription is still active) you have to choose "I want to deactivate my subscription" on each page. I feel a bit dead inside.

I will attempt to cancel with a company through the normal flow, but sometimes a simple email works just as well to get things done.
If there are too many hoops to jump through, I will contact my credit card company instead, they are more than happy to resolve the situation and just not process the payments anymore.

Sometimes the phone call is a hassle, but not evil. People don’t always understand the impact on their data and talking can help.
Other companies make that a black hole as well. Back in the day Vonage would put you on hold for >30 minutes. I ended up cancelling via AMEX disputed.

To be clear, the reason they make you call is to try and stop you from downgrading. The fact that there are some cases where the customer doesn't understand the impact on their data is the justification (fig leaf). You know this because if the latter risk were the same but the company couldn't stop the downgrade (e.g., the company is discontinuing the service and the customer needs to be helped on how to transfer their data to a similar competing service), the company would never offer to talk about it over the phone.

Yea, I can't understand the author. He's fine with Dropbox wasting his time and forcing him to give feedback info that the user is not obligated to give, but he doesn't like the way the de-emphasized buttons make him feel?
There should be a fast way to downgrade, whose only confirmation dialogs are ones to prevent accidental mis-clicks or irreversible damage. (Buttons designed to make me feel certain ways will certainly lower my view of Dropbox's classiness, in the same way as a desperate salesman, but as long as I can clearly understand the UI, I haven't been wronged.) If Dropbox wants to try and persuade the user, they can do so after they confirm the user will be downgraded with no further action.

I guess it's personal opinion, but I find it understandable that business want to learn and improve from cancellations, hence why I don't mind spending a minute letting them know why I'm taking an action.
You're right though, users aren't obligated to give feedback.
I don't like the de-emphasized buttons because they're essentially trying to trick me into clicking the more prominent buttons, which are actions I don't want to take at all.

Dropbox is infuriating. I love the app but will be switching this year. The Apple, Google, and Microsoft products are offerings are either good enough or close to it and are cheaper.
I pay a premium for their basic service, which lacks features like search, but even then I can’t escape ads and nags. If I was a business, I might be interested in Dropbox business, but I’m not. Leave me alone!

Too bad iCloud doesn't have sharing yet.

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