Tell HN: Being bullied by an Indian compliance automation platform

We were using Sprinto for compliance automation for a year or so. But in our recent renewal we ran into a technical issue related to payment therefore I notified their customer success manager about the issue, which they acknowledged. However, someone from their finance team who super privilege access disabled our account as due date had passed. We begged them to enable our account, which the team took almost 24h to respond to and upto 48h to resolve. As we operate in regulated space, this was nightmare, therefore we decided to let them know that we were going to terminate the service due to breach of trust and started looking for another oem.

However, their team now tells us termination for convenience is not allowed according to their terms of service and that we have to pay the full year contract regardless of whether we use it or not. We believe we terminated due to breach of trust. They have also threaten us to take legal action if we do not pay in next 7 days.

We believe they are not operating in good faith, bullying us into paying for a situation they have created.

We also believe that their regular employee have extended access into data of their customers which honestly makes us uncomfortable to operate with them.

The number we have to pay is around $4000 which I believe is not too much.

Question here is that should we standup against their bullying, malpractice and fight. And is it worth fighting for and pay their contract.

Please advice. We are smaller startup compared to Sprinto which has raised millions of dollars.