Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard
useloom.com
useloom.com
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 phone number of someone to call to cancel (remember phone calls?!). They put the hard sell to stay.
My plans changed, I stayed in the country. I really loved my NYTimes subscription (I miss my crosswords) - but ain't no way I'm signing up again until they make it equally easy to leave as it is to join. I apply that to every company I deal with now.
You're making it a pain in the butt to cancel? That card is no longer valid.
It's extremely useful though, and they say all the right words when it comes to their revenue and their management of user data. The way I see it: they're basically a credit-card company that gives you much finer control of your online payments; they could probably screw me over, but so could my actual credit-card company. They at least make it harder for other companies to screw me over.
You don't get out of contracts just by ghosting on them.
Eventually services will be cut off, but contractually you're likely responsible for charges up to that point and the companies involved may end up selling that debt to collection agencies (often for pennies on the dollar).
For utilities, you always pay much later after it was consumed. At least a whole month usually. It's a fundamental constraint with distributing water and electricity. You're always in debt with the utility provider.
For a newspapers subscription, you always pay in advance. They can cut it anytime. There is no reason for them to give you access if you didn't pay.
I think they were threatened with regulation and so stopped being so blatant, but they make money off holding customer's cash.
The provider certainly allows debt when moving in, while the contracts and payments are setup. Afterwards, I am not sure if the last bill if for the next or past period, probably a bit of both.
Planet Money had a good podcast episode on it: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/08/354591198/epis...
6 months in, you cancel your credit card (or it expires or whatever).
The fact that they can't bill you doesn't change that you agreed to the plan and that you owe the second 6 months anyway. That's a debt and the gym can (and some do!) choose to go after you for it in whatever legal way they feel. That's collection agencies, and direct lawsuits.
An open ended agreement ($10/month for a newspaper) often will have this same style - you agree to pay $10/month for access, they give you access. Valid until cancelled. If you simply ghost - is that cancellation? Probably not, and it's up to the contract. Of course, most consumer things just drop it and shrug, but that is not a given.
--amend yes it's (close to) fraud so be careful. Lots of things were illegal before they weren't; union strikes come to mind.
Still, everybody should routinely use nyms when interacting with parties that needlessly ask for them - if for nothing else than to hinder the surveillance society.
Services that care about cancellation and charge backs always charge the full duration upfront at the reduced price. Not month to month.
The gym, the newspapers or tinder will charge you ahead for the next month. If they can't charge you, they terminate your access and it ends the contract. You stop paying and you stop being able to use the service.
Maybe it's different in the UK but many people have got caught out assuming this is the case for gyms.
If you sign a contract saying you will pay £X each month until you cancel then just stop paying, you still owe the money.
As in, suppose a service advertises it open endedly as you stated, but I only needed 3 months of the service, then forgot about it or was traveling, is that considered illegal?
If you do this with any sizable company, you will just end up accumulating the original charge along with late fees until it is sent to collections and hits your credit report. Even if you get lucky and they just cancel your service, your lack of payment will still be reported to payment networks and eventually you will be deemed high risk when paying for other things.
Anything primarily online? They don't. Netflix, hulu, most credit card subscriptions that are VC funded (I've done with with countless SAAS providers), etc. I've ghosted them with no repercussions on my credit score or collections calls.
Edit: I also use paypal and click the remove merchant authorization button from there; that might also trigger some kind of forced cancellation?
Cancel the service properly and always have proof.
I doubt any court would go against the consumer in that situation. Especially if you never login or use the service again.
It ranks hundreds of websites from "easy" to "impossible".
1. delete all your posts the same way they would be deleted if you went to them and pressed the delete button.
2. Anonymize them (replace user name with "deleted user <randomnumber>").
3. Keep storing the username
After that, delete all other data (profile, settings, e-mail, password hash, ...)
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.
That said, I'm trying really hard to buy internet from Deutsche Telekom right now without much success, so it might just be that they're really struggling to make anything work at all, and they prioritize selling. I don't know how Germany got here. It's just absolutely insane at this point.
It wouldn't be the first time they did that.
I've been waiting since November to try and switch ISPs cause Unitymedia is as reliable as RFC 1149.
Don't tell me... As reliable as Twitter? It's got birds :-D
Although the way you describe it probably wasn't legal for a long time.
Instead I simply sent them an email insisting that I wanted to cancel, and that I refused to talk to them on the phone to do it. They replied with a “great offer” to reduce the price. In my reply I simply insisted on cancelling. I didn’t hear from them again, except for a confirmation by post a while later that the service had been cancelled.
Of course, this is much more effort than it should be, especially an emotional effort because being treated like this is very upsetting. But it might be worth trying.
there is no "just" about that...
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.
EDIT: s/now/no
Both support payment via Bitpay. ExpressVPN returned the money no problem after I've discovered that they don't do port forwarding.
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 howl and whine about “owning the customer relationship,” but unless they allow Apple for subscriptions, I won’t subscribe. I don’t need to be constantly reminder if their “special offers.”
I'd imagine this is in the Paypal terms when the company chooses to integrate with them and that 'debt' isn't enforceable
My experience is internet companies don't collect debt the way you describe. It's the offline companies that do (ISPs, gyms, utilities, banks, etc)
Edit: they also need to inform you before sending your debt for collections, giving you time to get it right with them before any credit score issues. Seriously, people are so worried about keeping their promises to companies that don't reciprocate that concern. Most companies just deal with the consequences of breaking the rules. Why shouldn't we apply the same to them as their users?
Some consider paypal to be archaic, but it's bleeding edge payment tech when placed alongside traditional credit cards.
Now we have even better tools available for subscriptions. Check out privacy card.
The disputes system is horribly inefficient. Reqarding fraudsters is worse than simply losing the money to mitigation efforts, as reqarding them incentivizes them too!
Right now payment processors are fairly detached from the negative repercussions, so they basically encourage customers to do chargebacks or disputes.
Had it happened with a credit you'd not only have your funds immediately blocked for 90 days, you also get hit with processing fees regardless of if the customer was scamming you or not.
It should be illegal.
What ended up happening was I went to the "Edit payment info" page and just entered my card number as 4242 4242 4242 4242, which is a Visa testing card number.
It authorized it as valid and I never dealt with the company again.
the only fraud here is your advice
By the way, your karma just reached 12345 so that means you've achieved HN Gold status. Congrats! Now never post again and stop receiving votes so it can stay that way.
Going from a quick, precise and inexpensive communications channel to a slow, synchronous, error-prone and costly one is something that really annoys me.
Dropbox is annoying to me because I have a service that I’m overpaying for, lack basic features like search, up sell with every interaction, and make leaving tough too.
This should be an option, not the only way to cancel.
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.
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.
Very clean way to illustrate the ridiculousness.
Comcast, Blue Apron, credit cards, etc. do it but I didn't think publishers were getting to this point.
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.
Companies rely on us feeling the pressure of social conformity.
Indeed legally I expect you can cancel by any reasonable means?
I found canceling MIT tech and the Atlantic to be painless btw
Pretty much any kind of slimy "roach motel" sales or customer retention tactic get your company instantly placed in the bottom circle of hell in my mind.
Another one is the ACLU. Easy to start, damn near impossible to stop without just canceling your card. All I wanted to do is change to a different card, but they ignore me. Great way to ruin your reputation.
Donating should be easy, but canceling should be just as easy. You can do it through our website anytime without speaking to anyone.
Might not apply here, but it's possible they were just attempting to be understood.
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. Don't know if this is true for the others (Amex, discover, etc) but I was shocked that this was Visa's policy.
On the flip side I subscribed to cigar afficiando for a year decade ago. Every year I get a renewal notice, every year I get new issues. I definitely have not paid for it since the first year. I don't know if it is to keep subscription stats up or they make enough on the ad revenue. But I'll receive multiple notices each year to renew and they just keep coming for free.
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.
Setting up something that lets you send those is a hassle the first time, but after that, sending a fax is about as easy as sending an e-mail.
I told them if I had to call, I would call my lawyer first, who would be calling them... and then they wrote back that they canceled.
So, these companies don't need to make you call, and even if it's inconvenient, difficult, or impossible to call to cancel, some won't budge. This should be illegal; if I sign up online, I should be able to cancel online. Making these artificial steps hampers business, my work time, my personal time... sitting on a phone waiting or slogging through steps or upsells is not a good way to do business and interferes with everything else.
It hasn't bothered the politicians enough, who are corporate shills anyway, so they haven't made it so companies have to be reasonable with this, like they did with CANSPAM.
Isaiah: Hello Jay and thank you for contacting The New York Times! My name is Isaiah and I will be able to make any changes to your account today! One moment while I pull up your account.
Isaiah: I have located your digital account and I would like to personally thank you for being a Basic digital subscriber with the account number (XXXXXXXX)
Isaiah: If you don't mind me asking, what led you to cancel? I would love to gain your insight and see if there are any potential issues that I may resolve for you.
Jay: Please cancel my subscription.
Isaiah: May I ask why you wish to cancel?
Jay: I decline to answer that. Please cancel my subscription.
Isaiah: please note that leaving will put you back at 5 free articles per month and you will no longer have unlimited access to our content. Any saved Cooking recipes will stay saved but you will not be able to view them until you subscribe again.
Jay: I understand. Please cancel my subscription.
Isaiah: I understand your concerns. Because your readership is important to us, I'd like to extend a special offer for $2 per week for 1 year.
Jay: No thank you. Please cancel my subscription.
Isaiah: You will continue to enjoy all your subscription benefits for the rest of your billing cycle, which ends on February 07, 2019. Unfortunately we cannot issue any credits or refunds for the remainder of this billing cycle.
What happens when you try to cancel outside business hours? Do they have 24/7 support, do they just let you cancel, or do they tell you to try again the next day?
I don't know about canceling outside business hours.
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 need to verify your information. We take these steps to minimize risk to the security of your information and of fraudulent information and removal requests. Specifically, we ask that you provide the following pieces of information:
- Username and email address associated with your Udacity User Account (if different from the one you provided in your initial request);
- Online Courses currently or previously enrolled in;
- Approximate date of User Account registration;
- Country of residence; and
- 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.
If, after you have provided the above information, we are unable to verify your identity and/or authority to issue the request, we may reach out to you for further verification information.
As a reminder, any deletion actions we take in response to your request are not reversible and may result in Udacity (or you) being unable to retrieve information about your account, enrollment, and records of completion. Please also keep in mind that all removals of such information are subject to requirements to maintain certain data in our archives for legal or legitimate business purposes.
If you have any questions about this request please see our Privacy Policy or let us know.
Thanks for your understanding.
Udacity Legal Team
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.
Yes, that's what I meant. If some stranger deleted my account, I don't think I would be angry enough to attempt to press criminal perjury charges against them.
What happens if you're taking part in the Georgia Tech/Udacity online Master's in Computer Science, and suddenly all of your course history on Udacity is gone? Are you then stuck with remotely trying to access records through whatever GA Tech has retained for MOOC students in a degree program? Does it prevent you from signing up for additional courses because there's no record of you completing the prerequisites? Does their platform have a provision for overriding those prerequisites, and what would that have to be based on - word from a professor who taught a MOOC, has never seen you or your work and probably depends on Udacity's listings?
A similar situation could arise if the platform is being used for mandatory continuing education credits in fields that have that. An industry that has CE requirements would often be well-served to partner with an established and stable online learning platform rather than building their own. If you're required to take X hours of CE annually to retain a license but the only proof you have is a PDF certificate from someplace that says "We've never heard of this person," do you qualify or do you end up in licensing/certification hell?
On the other hand, I have no idea what legal justification could Udacity claim. It's probably bogus.
That sounds like a complex process to avoid deleting the wrong things, but maybe not the same for stopping a subscription?
That delete process sounds like a pain, but I suspect even a "reasonable" delete process is gonna involve a lot of steps and be somewhat a pain considering the consequences of actually deleting data.
I'm not an Udacity customer, and after reading your account I never will be - I loathe these scummy tactics.
In fact, in Europe it's so many people that that's the law.
And what about a company where you can clear out the few bits of data they have, but still can't delete the account itself?
To delete your account's content I think here should be email verification or 2FA.
I know they wont miss our 220ish users, but I hope enough individuals see your post to put a dent in their numbers.
You read the post wrong.
I have no affiliation with Udacity but I feel that yours is an extreme response to a company that holds records of work that is very dear to some people and their careers.
Didn't windows 95 popularize the idea of the trashcan - temporary deletion - 20+ years ago? Don't many db tools support the idea of "soft deletes"?
"Hey - once we do this, you can't get anything back, ever, immediately, it's all gone. For good. But we're going to keep stuff forever that you can never see, and we won't tell you what it is. But you can't have your stuff back, ever. It's gone."
Even my "offline" university had the idea of "not paid", "suspended", "active", etc. Keep me on file, and I'll pay again in 12 months when I take more classes, etc.
In the end I just changed all my details to some variation of the phrase "cancel account" except the billing details (which I couldn't change) then did a chargeback every time they charged me.
It took them a couple of months to finally get round to cancelling my account (I think it was actually the bank who intervened). It was more effort than just calling the fac company, but I sure as hell wasn't playing their game.
Send them an email saying that you are deaf and can't talk on the phone. Works every time I've tried it.
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.
Not because I was thinking "wow, I've saved so much money".
But because I was thinking "wow, I'm buying too much stuff".
But the "In the last year" section of your account's order list is pretty much the same.
Those pesky engineers tried to charge me on my first post-prime purchase by giving me a $5.99 shipping charge. I was shocked! I knew the item said free shipping available. I checked other options (which were hidden behind a button), and lo and behold there was a free shipping option.
.scheduled-ad { display: none !important; } .nav-a.nav-hasImage.nav-right { display: none !important; } .nav-fullWidthSubnavFlyout.nav-flyout { display: none !important; } .a-section.a-spacing-none.uilm-section { display: none !important; } .acsUxWidget { display: none !important; } .cr-vote-buttons.cr-vote-component { display: none; } span[data-action="cr-popup"] { display: none; } #regularprice_savings { display: none; } #cbcc_content_container{ display: none !important; } .super-tcg, .dv-product-offer, #nav-swmslot, #ape_Detail_dp-ads-center-promo_Desktop_placement, #heroQuickPromo_feature_div,.iss-ad-row, #amsDetailRight_feature_div,#ape_Detail_customer-reviews-top_Glance_placement,#cm_cr-rvw_summary-ads{ display: none !important; } #nav-upnav{ display:none !important; } .nav-prime-try{ display:none; } .dv-dp-top-banner{ display:none; } .acs-private-brands-container-background{ display:none !important; } .maple-banner{ display:none !important; }
I no longer shop from Amazon. The more we accept these kind of indignities, the more they will be forced on us. Let them starve, that's the most powerful message one can send.
Edit / More data points:
- One more trick up their sleeve: they will default to two-day paid shipping even when you have free shipping available, just so that you'll feel the pain (i.e. the 'worth') of Prime every time you have to pay attention in the last page, and check the right 'free shipping' radio box for every shipment in your order.
- For me, the last thing that broke the camel's back was that they were specifically sending shipments to arrive on the last day of the shipment window. As a real example, I ordered a display on Jan 7 to arrive between Jan 14 and Jan 18. They shipped it Jan 17. This is what made me notice this, and it made me look at my past orders. Turns out, they have been doing this consistently, for a while.
The purpose of a shipping window is to allow for some slack in the case shipment gets delayed, it is for shipment. If they shipped it a few days before the window, that would be fine. If they shipped it right at the beginning of the window, that would still (arguably) be fine. If you ship in a way that is aiming for as late as possible delivery, that's pretty obvious what you're trying to do.
If you're not a Prime customer, your orders might arrive as late as they can make it. They are likely doing this on purpose.
For example, I've gotten multiple 1 month free trials, and also the '1 week for 1.99' which you can immediately cancel after placing your order for a $1 refund (if you immediately cancel, not at end of the week).
I don't shop at Amazon often, but I've gotten many (read: > 10) Prime shipments over the last year, probably paying a grand total of $3 or so.
If I don't have any good Prime offers upon checkout, I'll go to Ebay, find the product, soft by lowest price, and it's usually the same price, or within a dollar or so, and ships a LOT faster than Amazon.com's standard shipping (usually ends up coming from Amazon anyways proxied by the Ebay seller with Prime).
I've gone through the Amazon cancellation pages many times. They always keep tweaking it and expanding the process.
Now it's more like prime shipping means at least 3 business days. My last order was on Wednesday but I was told it would be here Monday unless I wanted to pay extra.
I'm getting rid of old computers, phones, and routers on eBay. Dealing with that is therapeutic but it makes it really tempting to cancel Amazon Prime just to raise barriers to accumulating stuff.
Here's screenshots over time:
2017: https://twitter.com/troyd/status/819409073590308864
2016: https://twitter.com/troyd/status/765560428663443456 <- the worst
2013: https://twitter.com/troyd/status/394173352199196674
All of these activate a recurring subscription fee. You can see the fee go from barely mentioned (2013) to as little disclosure as possible (2016, 2017). The 2016 version is so intentionally deceptive that it inspired a discussion among friends whether, if we were asked to implement something like this by an employer or client, we'd quit instead of doing it. The easy consensus was yes, both because it's beneath our ethics and because it destroys long-term value for the employer.
I'd love to hear how this came to be within Amazon, let alone how it got approved, kept, and made worse. Somewhere inside Amazon, there's a two-pizza team of developers implementing this value destruction.
I got the first two months free (Amazon.de), and at the end of the trial, when I wanted to cancel, they added a month for free, and I accepted the free month. My card was charged regardless and I had to email them to cancel it finally with no option to cancel at the end of this extended trial.
I think I'd just be obnoxious and say cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel...
I barely obey the social contract as it is.
Bit of a tangent but you know I always really hate telemarketing calls or just people I don't know phoning me generally because sometimes it's very hard to tell spam calls from the 1 out of 10 times it's a legit call you actually need to take. So I figured out a trick that works ok-ish. I answer the call and I say nothing. I wait for the other side to speak. Often it's a confused "hello???". If I don't recognize your voice and/or you don't introduce yourself and state your business I effectively screen you without giving you license to launch into your sales pitch. So far it has been a good compromise.
Sales people on the street trying to heckle me often get incredulous, well a minority but it happens, when I walk by completely ignoring their existence. It's like... I know it's in the social contract that if someone addresses you you are supposed to respond, but I crossed that clause out before signing because I knew it would be abused like this.
People that don't know you that approach you out of the blue either want your time, your money, or your body. I don't owe them shit and especially not the time of day. The exception to this rule is that some people are tourists that are a little stuck and need help. It's pretty easy to delineate those cases and I almost always help.
I dunno. I find the world abusive fullstop. So I just give it the fewest possible avenues through which to abuse me and don't go down the ones that I can see lead to abuse. I feel no need to feel badly about the way I behave in this regard and am ok with people thinking I'm an asshole for doing it.
This is where you copy-paste the timecube website and tell them you don't want to do business with a company that cannot understand 4-corner time.
> 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.
At that point, there's no need to state it, go straight for the chargeback and attach a copy of the cancellation letter and registered mail receipt.
I wouldn't put is as "very hard", but they could probably drop the last confirmation page since any value you get by having these pages dramatically falls off after the first.
I suppose it was lucky that I was visiting that city the upcoming weekend, so I did end up cancelling in person - but my experience sounded and felt illegal.
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/nextcloud
I haven't tested it yet, as I am running my Nextcloud on my own server, but I found their offer quite compelling.
It supports disks, AWS API-compatible blob storage and Ceph and OpenStack Swift as storage backends.
You can also mount Seafile folders as drives using Webdav or a FUSE extension.
I highly recommend it!
Disclaimer: no affiliation, just a Dropbox refugee that's been very happy with Seafile for ~3 years
Recently had a horrible experience with Full Contact. You can sign up with a couple clicks, but you need to email them to cancel. Then they'll sit on your request so you get billed for another month while they're processing it and then they'll kill your plan right away for the month you just paid for. Horrible!
Plan B is to use virtual credit card numbers, such as https://privacy.com preferably with a bogus name.
Too many tech companies are shady.
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-wasting counter-offers. It was extra annoying when she started prefacing them with “I know you said you just wanted to cancel BUT...”. (Really?!? That means you know I don’t want it and you know you are wasting my time, yet you choose to waste it anyway! Is your manager behind you or something?)
I have seen this with everything from cards to cable companies. All I can figure is that these companies simply have too much power. There just aren’t that many cable choices or card choices for example, so how exactly am I going to storm off and never return?
Thanks for posting this.
I've never signed up for Dropbox Pro but this is off-putting because their product seems pretty well rounded in most cases.
Every chargeback a company gets costs them money, on top of the money they aren't getting from you. If a company gets a high enough charge back rate, their credit card processing vendor will revoke their services. Fraud/Chargebacks are a MAJOR issue for any company accepting credit cards.
If you've made it clear you wish to cancel and are in no other way violating a contract (ex: You signed up for a 1 year subscription billed monthly with Adobe Cloud, ya gotta pay them for the year), then you are free and clear.
I had a yearly plan and had moved everything off to my own NAS in the last month before subscription renewal.
Was very surprised to see an additional year billed to my account!
Well annoying, and quite ugly.
And ironically, it may lead to 1 or 2 more clicks than what was shown in the video, but at least there are no dark UI patterns.
[0]: Referral link: https://privacy.com/join/S5U7B
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. ;)
Aside from this I had 2 other problems with Dropbox:
1. On startup, it would render my machine unusable for over 1 hour. Now, it was syncing from 5400 RPM spinning rust, but still - there are good solutions that don't require hashing every file on the drive with the crappest and slowest possible hash implementation (USN change journal, file system minifilters).
2. Despite only syncing between 2 machines, there were frequent, unexplained 'sync conflicts' that resulted in duplicate copies of file (or sometimes data loss). These conflicts were not even discoverable in the Dropbox UI - you'd only see them if you looked in the folder and say the extra 'conflict' files
Oh, and they sent me a ridiculous number of emails after cancelling my Pro account. I cancelled in March 2016, and they regularly spammed me until October 2018. Only some of the emails I received over that time included an 'unsubscribe' link, and despite using those I did get, they didn't stop the emails - pretty scummy behaviour.
So, poor product, poor customer service, and scummy tactics. Not their biggest fan...
Nowadays I use Seafile, hosted in a Docker container on a low-powered Azure VM, backed by Azure Bloc Storage. Works flawlessly, and I highly recommend it. I understand this isn't a solution for the general population, but if you're technically minded (this is HN; you are), it's really easy to setup. You can use VM-mounted disks or AWS API-compatible block storage (Azure Blob Storage isn't, but I have another container running Minio, which acts as a proxy between the Azure API and Azure Blob Storage - it was plug-and-play, just working OOTB)
It's such a major annoyance that I ended up paying for another cloud file host instead.
Nice work, OP.
The "Start free trial" button on the website literally did nothing. If I clicked it enough times, I eventually got a poorly worded error asking me to try again in 24 hours. This happened in multiple browsers. I tried many times over the course of several days with no success. I had coworkers try in case it was something specific to my machine or network. They got the same error.
I opened a support request and asked if they could help me manually open a Dropbox Business account. No, they couldn't. The best advice they were able to give me was to try clearing my browser cache and cookies (I did; it didn't help).
Finally I dug around and managed to find a link directly to a billing form, and was able to sign up by having them start billing me immediately instead of going through a free trial. I signed up for annual billing, naively assuming the per-user annual fee would be pro-rated (like Slack and most other good per-user services do) if our small company hired or lost any employees.
During the course of that year I did end up removing two users from our Dropbox Business account. Since we had already paid for the full year up front, I expected the next annual charge to reflect a pro-rated charge. But nope! The automatic renewal paid no attention to the _actual_ number of users on our account, and Dropbox charged us as if those users still existed.
Turns out the number of licenses you're billed for has to be managed manually. If you have 10 licenses and 10 users and then remove two users, that doesn't affect the license count. You have to remove two licenses manually. And if you pay up front for a year but remove two licenses halfway through the year? Too bad. No pro-rated reduced charge next year. Better be sure to predict your exact staffing numbers a year in advance next time.
Want to add a user halfway through the year when you're already at your license limit? It'll just fail with a cryptic error until you finally realize you need to first go to a different page and manually add a license. And sometimes (like literally as I type this) the Billing page you need to visit to do this is completely broken and just serves up an error that says "Oh hello. Sorry for this little hiccup."
Dropbox's core functionality works well and I have no complaints about it, but everything related to billing is so unintuitive and so frequently broken that I wonder whether they even care about it.
So yeah, I guess it doesn't surprise me that canceling is hard too.
This is my action plan #1 when vendor start irritating me with their support or policies.
(No idea what the low end is but I’ve had $25 debts sold when I lost track of a medical charge.)
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.
It makes it feel like a very shady process without being outright deceptive.
This was pitched by their marketing as a way to make online shopping safer, because even if they did get the card and the expiry date and everything, they couldn't spend more than the limit which you likely already hit when you bought your item. But the hidden feature was it made cancelling difficult services a breeze, because you could just log in to your banking portal and kill the temporary card you made for that service.
I had a subscription that was not lapsed on NORVPN and I wanted to delete my account. Of course I had to contact customer support and after 2-3 emails confirming that yes I actually want to delete my account even if it has an active subscription that I had paid for and no there is no particular reason for it except that I don't use it they actually removed me.
It wasn't the end of the world but I would really like a button.
Funnily enough their customer service is called "Customer success team". I had to laugh out loud at that.
In any case, the worst offender here is probably facebook with their probation pattern.
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.
Recurring income is more highly valued than one-off / extraordinary income. Most traditional companies (telecom, banks, even gyms) have been this way, backing off only when forced to by regulation. It's sad, but not surprising to see the newer breed of companies also adopt these practices.
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.
> ...
> I am actually not very sure what we see here, is it a dark pattern?
It sounds like you've been in the grey/black side of the UX industry for too long, and have become a bit institutionalised.
eg You're not see things clearly.
If possible, maybe take a break from the UX space for a year or so, and do something else? Might help to regain your sense of things. :)
My concern is that companies like Dropbox will eventually learn that the reason the companies that are famously hard to end a relationship with are that way is because, in the end, you make more money that way.
- I went into settings
- Pressed the button to cancel the plan
- ~75 words about what would happen to the individual accounts created with the Dropbox for Business plan
- One more button saying I still wanted to cancel my account
- Three checkboxes confirming that I understand my data would be deleted from Dropbox
- Now I could finally cancel
It might sound like a lot, but I appreciate that they didn't have any "No I don't wanna be awesome anymore and have 10TB of Dropbox storage" like they did in this video.
Example: Willow TV
We’ve noticed you haven’t used your XXX@XXX.com Dropbox account in over one year and have closed your account for you. Devices connected to this account have now stopped syncing. Any remaining files in your account will be subject to deletion.
Sincerely, - The Dropbox Team
There goes my files. Fuck dropbox. Stick to google drive.
What do you expect?
It's legal obligation to make as much money for the shareholders.
No need to cancel anything. You just shut down the payment card that is paying for the service lol. Once they see your card getting declined they will just close the account.
I've always wanted to have a site that showed me "moral" alternatives to websites and such but this type of information is difficult to normalize :)
Which do you think the company cares about more?
Next time it might be better if the lawmakers would ask someone to design a proper API for them and the browser vendors should care of the GUI instead of the website providers. Otherwise, we will end up again with this superb user experience where every website tries a new pattern to convince you to take their tracking cookies.
this may not work if you have a contract, but if the business doesn't make it easy enough to cancel a service agreement they have no right to my money and i'm going to make sure my response affects their bottom line so they pay attention and cancel my account.