Tell HN: Vimeo's free trial is predatory | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Vimeo's free trial is predatory

55 pointsthrowaway48932218 comments

TLDR: Vimeo will hold your video's continued availability hostage if you choose to downgrade before your free trial ends – even if the plan you're downgrading to has the same storage limits. They'll also charge you before your trial ends.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Needing more storage, I sign up for their Standard free trial (yearly billing). I know I will likely want the monthly plan, but the yearly plan is the only one that offers a trial. I figure I'll test drive the features for a few days, and I schedule in my calendar to switch from yearly to monthly billing before the trial ends. I receive an email with the following assurance:

> You will not be charged for your Standard plan until your free trial ends on Sep 3, 2024.

2. On Sep 2, 2024 – a day before the date they quoted me – my bank account gets charged the full $240.

3. I rush to the Vimeo dashboard to see what happened. No sign of any charge, and according to their dashboard I'm still on my trial. For good measure, I disable auto-renew.

4. I'll deal with this false charge later – first, it's time to downgrade to monthly billing... Only there's absolutely no way to do this. According to their help docs, you need to contact support to downgrade your plan. And you need to do it a full 24 hours before your renewal. I reach out to support.

5. Support tells me there's no way they can switch me to monthly. I'll have to resubscribe once my service lapses. Crucially, that means my pro features – specifically larger video storage – will be unavailable during that time. This is a huge problem, as my videos are in the shipped stage, and a link not working, even temporarily, would be very bad.

This is so obviously designed in a shady way. From the day-early charge, to the inability to downgrade without emailing support, to the threat of having videos temporarily unavailable if you choose to downgrade. I used to like Vimeo for their design and commitment to independent filmmakers, but this is intentionally convoluted and predatory.

I think this is a little over-excited. Throwing around phrases like "false charge" and "holding your videos hostage" is a bit much. It sounds like their billing system is a bit clunky and you were probably hit by a timezone issue, which isn't great but hardly "predatory".

I have nothing to do with Vimeo and don't want to sound automatically on their side but it sounds like you're getting exactly what you wanted? You even talk about needing to change to monthly billing in a year - so you still expect to be using it - didn't you just save money? They billed you a few hours early, OK, not cool, but that doesn't rise to "predatory" in my book.

> their billing system is a bit clunky

That's a very naive way of looking at things.

Billing system restrictions, especially around downgrading and cancellations, are always artificial.

It’s quite plausible to me that they simply never bothered to build something to handle this extreme edge case. And frankly, if I was in charge I would probably agree.

The billing being slightly early seems like the only thing vimeo have done wrong here. Everything else is on the OP trying to game their system and screwing up. I don’t have much sympathy, to be honest.

It's common to have discussions on HN about the technical difficulty of billing systems, although these could possibly be explained by:

(1) Technical people are getting crazy requirements from Sales

(2) People find thinking things through hurts their head

(3) Somebody thinks they can charge you a recurring subscription so you can charge somebody a recurring subscription

I appreciate your perspective, but have to disagree.

(Some quotes below are from your child comment, but I wanted to respond to all of them in one place)

> Everything else is on the OP trying to game their system and screwing up.

I was attempting to use the free trial as designed -- a few days free, and then (if everything goes according to expectation), begin paying. Not sure how that's gaming the system, unless you feel that signing up for a yearly trial with the likely outcome of switching to monthly billing is "gaming the system." I would call it taking them up on their offer.

> The billing being slightly early seems like the only thing vimeo have done wrong here.

I'm glad you agree this was wrong. I live month-to-month, and their billing error could've been quite catastrophic for me. It brought my account below my monthly rent, which is due in a few days, certainly before I would get any sort of refund from them. Yes, this is not a good way to live, but it's my financial situation at the moment. Luckily I was able to get Venmoed the $240 from a family member which I instant-deposited into my bank account. I'm incredibly fortunate to have that privilege. Having a $240 charge pulled from your bank account sooner than agreed upon is a big deal for a large percentage of the world.

> doesn't rise to "predatory" in my book

Understood. In my book, it's predatory to offer a free trial for hosting content, and then when someone wants to switch from annual to monthly tell them the only way to do that is to have a lapse in the hosting.

Imagine you built a web app. You decide on a host, and -- oh look -- they have a free trial! Awesome. You sign up for the trial, give them your credit card info, post your website to Show HN.

People are visiting the site! You're rising on Show HN! Comments and the whole lot.

As your trial nears the end, you try to change from yearly to monthly billing. You find out the only way to do this is to... email support? Okay I guess. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

You reach out to support. And they inform you that you'll have to let the billing lapse in order to do this. When it lapses, the website will go down.

You're rising on Show HN, people are engaging with the site, and now you have to face the idea that hundreds of people will see a dead site... UNLESS you just pony up and pay the yearly fee. Now you're weighing paying more, or having your content disappear for a percentage of your visitors.

To me, this is clearly designed to force you into yearly billing. If that ain't a predatory practice in your book, I can accept that. We'll just have to disagree on the definition of predatory.

> they simply never bothered to build something to handle this extreme edge case

Again, I can accept you think this is an extreme edge case. I think that switching from yearly to monthly before your next billing cycle must be somewhat common, especially on a service as popular as Vimeo.

I recommend filing a complaint with the FTC and your state’s Attorney General, and indicate it is dark pattern related.

Thanks! Looking into this now.

If you actually want your money back talk to your own lawyer. Don't count on the FTC or an AG to do anything. They're swamped and mostly toothless.

This has not been my experience when engaging regulators, but small claims court is always a parallel path that is painful for the corporate target and they will usually roll over and return your funds vs attempting to defend against the claims in small claims court.

Also, Always Be Establishing a Paper Trail.

Is it possible they billed at 0:00 GMT? (if you're in the continental US, that can be anywhere from 5-8 pm local time)

Definitely possible! The issue is that when I went to my Vimeo settings, I was still on the free trial. No sign of the charge, and I still had the option to turn off auto-renew for the free trial. (Which I did -- it did not reverse the charge).

Also (and I'm guessing you agree with this): When you tell a customer they won't be charged until a certain date, you should probably either (a) know their timezone and adjust the billing date relative to that or (b) know the earliest date that they might get billed in their timezone and quote them that date rather than GMT, or (c) assume they could live anywhere and don't charge them before that date hits in the last possible timezone. Or just don't provide a date at all if you can't get the system to behave predictably.

The best system is to either make it 7 calendar days to the second, or disclose the exact time the billing will occur when you sign up.

I did see that auto-renewal must be disabled at least one day before:

"Automatic Renewal: To the extent permitted by applicable law, Self-Serve subscription plans automatically renew at the end of each subscription period unless canceled at least one day before the renewal date listed in your Billing Settings."

https://help.vimeo.com/hc/en-us/articles/12425398980625-Vime...

(I did look through their terms, and it doesn't disclose the precise time they will bill, they only referred to dates)

I feel the best way to inform users is to send them an automated mail - 24 or 48 hours - before actual charge and tell them explicitly how many hours before upcoming charge, which makes it easier for a user to figure out actual time of the charge irrespective of their timezone.

Have you tried BunnyCDN?

https://bunny.net/

Switched away from Vimeo after knowing from this.

They're a desperate company on the decline

Sorry, but it sounds like you wanted something for free (making some assumptions about subsequently being able to change to a different plan) and are now frustrated it didn’t work out exactly as you’d intended.

Too late for this time, but a personal practice I’ve adopted is to make sure I’m paying for the thing I want before building on it (even if there’s a trial), so that the company views me as a customer. Ie tending to upgrade before it’s strictly required.

I think this is good advice. If you're 99% sure you're going to end up paying for the thing, just skip the free trial and start paying.

Lesson learned.

This is awful, I'm going to seriously reconsider using them for future video projects

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