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Comment by ajaygoel | Hacker News Reader

It's not something I'm proud of, but I'm not embarrassed by it either. The upset commenters are the minority of our users. Some parts of our UI are a little difficult -- most commands have to be done via the Gmail Compose window, because we want the entire experience to be inside Gmail. That workflow is unnatural for some.

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I hear you, except you don’t address the refunds and cancellations concerns. I now have a habit of only using software that makes refunds and cancellations pain free. I shouldn’t have to email you to cancel, this is just creating a false barrier to make your users life more difficult so maybe they won’t cancel and you can get another charge out of them. The fact that you believe this impacts a small minority of users and your overall response to this is very disconcerting. This impacts all of your users, only some of them are complaining. I also guarantee that you aren’t reaching your full potential because people are reading those comments and not signing up in the first place.

Cancellation is instant and doesn't require an email being sent. You'll see that in the post.

You may be right. A better solution might be to build an external UI for account management, but I've shied away from that, wanting to keep everything inside Gmail. Maybe in the future though.

I think you should have the email set up not to bounce and cancel accounts sent to that address just as readily as you cancel when they press the magic button. A lot of headaches and bad will considering anyone can cancel with their credit card and you might get screwed by your payment processor.

It might help to separate out business functions from the product itself.

From your comment on the blog: > Like I’ve explained above, cancel@gmass.co is not an email address.

To the average user, it certainly looks like an email address. Maybe just have it act like a normal email and list it under the support section of your website: https://www.gmass.co/#contact

Still, given the number of people who seem to be having trouble with it, maybe it'd be worth re-thinking that design?

Given the number of people that (reportedly) paying for it, maybe it's good enough.

Making it difficult to cancel is not a good way to keep churn down. It's going to come back and bite him if that's the way it still works. His customers are clearly telling him the current system is broken.

What about the upset users who just don't publicly comment? Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean users are happy with it.

Great story, thanks for sharing.

ajaygoel you are an inspiration! Thanks for sharing your story!

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