Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel
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At least in California there seems to be a law preventing this. https://www.cnet.com/news/companies-must-let-customers-cance...
"The law states that customers who accept an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online must be able to cancel the service online. [...] The law means you won't have to make anymore phone calls to obscure customer service hotlines to cancel services like news subscriptions, music streaming or meal plans, for example."
per https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...:
17602 says, "It shall be unlawful for any business that makes an automatic renewal offer or continuous service offer to a consumer . . . "
where 17601 defines a consumer as "any individual who seeks or acquires, by purchase or lease, any goods, services, money, or credit for personal, family, or household purposes."
A bank, bank holding company, or the subsidiary or affiliate of either, or a credit union or other financial institution, licensed under state or federal law.
Not a lawyer so not sure if this applies in this case. I did find the exclusion list interesting (and saddening).
I escalated to the crtc and opened a case. I got a call back from someone who was very good at apologising for this policy but was at the same time very clear that this was within their legal rights as a service provider.
Super convenient that I can sign up to any service with one click though.
This is a French perspective where such a reaction would be normal. I did it twice, one company called to say I am in the wrong, I asked them to please repeat so that I can record that for the lawsuit.
They hung up and never called back.
Bell Canada and other big Canadian corporations have direct access to credit report records. If not paid, they will spoil your credit report. A credit report is essential in Canada for things such as credit cards, mortgage, car loan, and sometimes even for renting an apartment or home. With a poor credit report score all this would become more expensive or even unavailable.
Customer service provided by large corporations in Canada is sometimes absurdly poor, but you can't do much about it because there are simply no reasonable alternatives.
Same goes for a credit card, you can ask you ban for a reverse charge and disallow any further charges from that company.
This credit report thing is a real pain in the US/Canada, from what I see in various posts and comments.
When I eventually gave up and called, the representative tried to convince me not to cancel by describing the various scenarios in which emergencies could happen (including my family getting hurt) and I wouldn't be reachable without the phone plan.
This wreaks fear into most merchants, not only because fraud policies at banks greatly favor the buyer, but also because too many reversals within a certain period can cause a payment processor to charge higher rates on all transactions indefinitely, sometimes even if the merchant always cooperates.
Edit: Also usually works with most check cards, but I've come close to losing with them a couple times, whereas real credit cards are practically bulletproof in my experience unless you're just attempting some kind of egregious fraud.
If they use invoice based billing then i make sure it's easy to cancel.
Don't support businesses with shady practices.
The other thing I learned - if your card is lost and you get a new credit card, I thought I had to update the number for the subscriptions. Nope, some services like Comcast knew my new number automatically, while others didn't. I don't know how this works.
Let people cancel, confirm they've cancelled, and then ask for feedback. Put a feedback box on the confirmation page, imvite them to reply to the confirmation email. If you really must know, send a letter, and make one phone call (leave a message when they don't answer).
Anything else is abuse, and they're leaving you because you're abusive.
Big companies like Comcast are just doing this to extract every penny.
A startup trying to survive and make their product better for customers--or fix something that went wrong--is completely different situation IMO.
I'm okay with an optional questionnaire, and I often fill them out when I cancel a service. But if it wants me to call to cancel, and especially if it deliberately makes the call longer and unbearable, I have all the reasons to be angry about it. I don't care if it's a struggling startup. A startup is an organization, not an actual life; I'm not going to pity it.
Obviously, an optional questionnaire is not as effective as forcing a call onto the customer. But it's the right thing to do.
True. I'm questioning where is the trade-off and balance between making it more difficult to cancel vs. trying to fix what's wrong.
If I need to do anything more than sending the message (on my own schedule - this part is important, I manage my personal life on nights and weekends) saying “hi, I’d like to cancel please” in order to actually have service cancelled and billing stopped, I’m likely to be frustrated and not give any feedback.
I’ve had very positive experiences with reps replying to confirm my service was cancelled, and then initiating a quick conversation about why I asked for that. I’m usually happy to offer at least some quick feedback, because I didn’t feel like I was being held hostage.
I’d still prefer virtually any other no-contact mechanism for ending an agreement for consumer services, though. Offer me winbacks if you want, add an optional exit interview to the process. But really, please don’t gate my ability to end an agreement I’m theoretically able to cancel at any time behind a manual process that’s any more difficult than my signup was. The intent is different but the end result is the same for the customer.
It's important to be reasonable about this, though. Email isn't secure, and anyone could send an email pretending to be you. If there are irreversible consequences to cancelling, such as deleting personal data held on the service, not only would it be irresponsible to accept an unverified email message as a cancellation request, it could actually be illegal in various places (under the GDPR, for example).
Not providing a straightforward cancellation option via a website where the customer's identity has already been confirmed using their normal credentials is a different matter entirely.
If a customer emails to cancel, just email back a cancellation link that requires signing in. I think that's a good middle ground.
Obviously if someone does email asking to cancel, a suitable method of cancellation should be explained to them.
CA passed a law in 2018 requiring companies that allow people to signup online to also allow them to cancel online https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
"In addition to the requirements of subdivision (b), a consumer who accepts an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online shall be allowed to terminate the automatic renewal or continuous service exclusively online"
> Hi guys--Jonathan here at Bare. I've forced everyone's hand on this because... whelp... we've recently acquired the business and we ended up finding that we can be critical to Stripe Webhooks processing for folks on the older Stripe API. We literally will take down your invoicing on Stripe when a customer cancels. Then we have the unsavory task of working with customers that have canceled, did not complete their deprovisioning and then flame us for causing them outages. I love a lively debate but if you're a customer and love us, reach out to me NOW and I'll hear your feedback. If you're not a customer, then please, please if you never want to talk to your vendor, please go to ProfitWell or ChartMogul. Patrick and Nick are great guys and are crushing it and will gladly take your business. We are getting eaten from the bottom by platforms AHEM Stripe that are inspired by us, folks that clone us and you can see from our revenue transparency that we're the last in line for making money. That is going to change--by helping customers that really want to make more... make more. If you'd like to give me direct feedback, give me a ring at 855 252 6050. (I'm also a CISSP™, CREST CRT™ and Brown Cybersecurity dude--so if you've any legislation that speaks to this, let me know--for you folks quoting CA--we have business customers and they are over 13.)
I've met Brian. It's so disappointing to see him do this.
I'm struggling to think of a situation when I'd want to follow that email-with-deadline pattern but didn't intend to complete the destructive action anyway, like closing all accounts because the service is shutting down, or notifying customers that you're changing business model and they need to switch to some alternative under your new terms first if they want to continue using your service.
As someone with intense social anxiety, forcing me to call someone is a sure way to trap (extort?) me in your service. I guess a credit card charge back would warrant a call as well.
- You are nobody to tell us (business owners) what we do or don't want.
- Can call and have to call are two very different things.
- Your reference to "real businesses" is prepotent and condescending. Also, I enjoyed the irony given you just admitted in another comment that Baremetrics is a sinking ship.
Hey dude, you can rest easy! I promise that no "real business" I'm involved with will ever use Baremetrics while you're running it.
Listen to your customers here.
If there are people that want a call, offer the option, but please don't force it. And don't do sneaky updates to your terms which make this a requirement.
usiegj00, don't make the mistake of assuming that most commenters here are just junior JavaScript programming trolling on a forum. Half your customers are reading this thread today.
Hmmm, doesn't a terms update require the customers to re-agree to the terms? So if they made the update to terms about requiring a call, and never requested customers re-agree to the terms, then technically the customer doesn't have to follow said terms, correct? The old terms are still in play, or the account must be canceled.
Loophole?
That may have been true when Rackspace were competent.
However, that was years ago, prior to them being acquired by a private equity firm.
No-one in their right mind should use Rackspace these days, under any circumstances.
Being able to do everything important about a service myself is one of the criteria I use for selecting services, including cancellation.
And you most definitely can talk to AWS on the phone. With paid support (which I'm sure your real businesses are using, right?), you can get a call back almost instantly any time of day.
That’s the point.
You are in the wrong, and even if you think you aren’t, the way you’re handling this right now proves the point.
Looking at you, New York Times
Sounds like there's a long list of SaaS apps to avoid:
Any explanation as to why Xenon installs this policy?
Without any further background that list of companies is going straight to the red-flagged list that will never get my business.
Xenon Partners, who acquired Baremetrics has a "Playbook". The guy who is shown in the twitter image is Brian Sierakowski (https://www.linkedin.com/in/briansierakowski/) who is in charge of running the "Xenon Playbook" for Baremetrics.
What Xenon does is acquire floundering / stagnating / doing ok SaaS companies from founders who want to sell. They buy the company with a structured acquisition (see above) and then they run their "playbook" to pump revenue and profits. Then they will sell the company for some multiple.
They will arbitrage their payments to the founder to make sure that cash flow works out. So, what you're seeing here is the Xenon playbook in action: accelerate revenues, decrease churn, slow payables, all that. I wonder what else is in their playbook.
Xenon was itself acquired by a firm called DreamFactory which seems to have started the model in 2017 or 2018, and then took on the Xenon brand themselves to operate their SaaS Private Equity / Hedge Fund model.
[1] HN discussion on the acquisition here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25045325
Surely they understand that this is going to do the rounds on social media and tech forums, and that a significant proportion of their entire global market is likely to have heard about the dispute within the next few days? And that looking both incompetent and untrustworthy, as they obviously do here, is going to risk both losing existing customers and deterring potential new ones?
Some areas have something along these lines, but not many in the grand scheme of things.
Also maybe something about notifications of pending recurring charges. Those two tactics are pure slime from my perspective.
They do claim "it's not a sales rep" though, so the only other motivation I can think of is manual feedback collection.
I sent them cancellations, but it only works if you send the cancellation in the last 90 days (or something) of the 24 months. Miss the window and you're on the hook for 24 more payments.
It's the most customer-hostile experience I have ever had with a company in the global west.
I decided it was easier to just let them try to collect, and stopped the autodebit to them.
Some say you can still hear their dunning emails to this day, when the wind is blowing...
Now some of them will just make you pay a penalty if you recede early, but you can still cancel at anytime.
"Got it! Let me know how I can help with the dispute process."
I didn't post that update on Twitter I think.
Likewise you could file a complaint with Stripe.
What we have here is inexperienced people in a startup acting stupid, but a little suggestion from the attorney generals office or their payment processor usually gets some really good attention.
The wrong-headedness here is astounding.
I also suggested elsewhere a complaint to the CA AG.
A CEO fielding a call from their payment processor or AGs office has a humbling effect.
I have come to accept the fact that US corps run via a “grow at any cost” algorithm/herd mentalofu. They will bend and twist every law to their favor even if it’s a terrible user experience.
That's fine by me. The call to cancel has never been too onerous, and the CSR reps never did this kind of back and forth. Don't want the discounted offer? No problem, your subscription is now cancelled.
I was disgusted that you couldn't delete your account without making a phone call.
They link to a Zendesk instance but the actual form doesn't seem to render at all hence no ticket can be submitted.
Presumably this is caused by one of the various ad/tracker blocking items I have running but the fact you can't submit a ticket via what should otherwise be a plain HTML form is kinda nuts
Comcast Verizon AT&T
And I think it becomes more common if there isn’t a mechanism to push back. All kinds of dark patterns (you have to remember a code you supposedly set with AT&T when you first signed up that — get this — is never used for any other service). Verizon just paused my billing and then started again (presumably because the original person assisting didn’t want to have a ding on her record).
Sad thing is this must be effective or they would not keep doing it.
There used to be a service that would charge $5 just to cancel Comcast but I can’t find them anymore.
I hope they are not intentionally blocking this in other states.
Luckily my card expired shortly after so I didn't bother, and since then they send weekly emails telling me that updating my card info is just "one click away".
Sorry AVAAZ.
Since then I am very careful to only use PayPal for recurring subscriptions or donations.
No, you can't just cancel any service by blocking your card payments. Legally they are quite distinct actions, and depending on the situation, you may find yourself with debt collectors chasing you quite rightly for money you legally owe, damaged credit, etc.
If the service provides a reasonable means of cancelling, just use it. If it doesn't, take other action as appropriate, but don't just silently block payments without making a reasonable attempt to tell the service you are cancelling.
</response>
MAKES SENSE. /s
What makes you think security has anything to do with this?
"Yeah id like to cancel, can you email me on xxx@yyy.com to discuss details?"
How fucking ableist. Where are these scumbags based that they think they can get away with this nonsense?
I've always explained that I changed jobs because that was the only way to get a promotion / salary raise. Most companies do a default 1-5% yearly increase, whereas when I move to another company, I can get an instant 15-25%.
Things like this are a two way street, yet companies often don't treat it as such.
EDIT: Because you've changed your answer after I typed my response. Some people might be okay with having to stay 10+ years in a company to finally get that role they wanted. I'm not, if I think I deserve better, I'll ask my company for it, if they tell me that maybe in 5 years I can get a better thing, then I rather switch jobs now instead of holding myself back.
I also prefer to stick to one company for a couple of years and make my way up there. But if after a year all you can offer is 1% salary increase, and often no promotion, then as an employee, I don't feel valued at all. (Obviously, this all depends on my performance as well)
It seems odd that there is an assumption that an employee can't provide value within a year.
For many people a phone call is not "just a phone call". Companies doing this know why they force customers to call. So did this one when they changed the terms of service recently.
No, it's not the end of the world for most. But it sure shows how they treat their customers.
I would make it a mission to never do business again with such a customer hostile company.
The Stripe angle is interesting, someone should see how Stripe feels about endorsing such behaviour.
You know I want to leave, let me leave and stop being abusive.
What next? Outrage that you can't cancel your doctor's appointment via twitter?
Worry about actual shady shit out there instead.
1) They make it easy to cancel when you call
2) They only try to offer you some free stuff to stay as a customer
My guess is the startup here is trying to learn why customers are cancelling so they can improve the product and they care about keeping customers happy.
Almost all non-web companies make you call to cancel, so I don't see what the big deal is.
The only mistake here is with the email back and forth. Probably the customer support person didn't understand WHY the startup was doing this and made the situation worse.
> Provide a simple cancellation procedure, and, if the Cardholder’s order was initially accepted online, at least an online cancellation procedure.
https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/about-visa/visa-rules...
If I were your customer I would make a point of taking every legal avenue to punish you for this behavior, and the reasoning here guarantees I wouldn’t think of touching your product.
Regardless, I don’t get why anyone uses Baremetrics, your dashboard is slow as shit and looks like your customer service is equally shit.
Hey man, just wanted to let you know that you've accidentally placed free trial and mailing list buttons on your home page. Seeing as you're not a consumer service and all you probably want to take those down.
You've also accidentally integrated with the consumer service known as Stripe, who have the horribly consumerish feature of closing your account right in account settings. Might want to get on that before the Coalition of Serious Business finds out.
Just wow..
I guess everyone who disagrees with him is a troll.
Good luck, you're going to need it.
What does this even mean? Are you saying that if you remove a customer’s Stripe integration, it prevents them from being paid by their own customers?
[0]: https://stripe.com/partners/apps-and-extensions/invoicing
> you can see from our revenue transparency that we're the last in line for making money
Maybe there are some social reasons for that. You've definitely lost face here.
Otherwise it's way too difficult to interpret it as anything else but a cheap and very sad way to keep a customer. A really sad business practice.