Personally, I'm done with these kind of mind hacks.<p>While not quite in Facebook 'Your friends will miss you' territory, it still feels quite scummy.<p>They belong to an era of the Internet where growth and retention stats trump all. Just let me cancel.<p>Oh, and if you cancel and are over the limit and login, Dropbox will give you a nag screen and hold your files hostage till you cough up.<p>How this is in any way an example of good practice is beyond me.
I think the core problem is that you lose that available space even if you paid out through the month/year. I have a suspicion this is an intentional dark pattern to keep people from downgrading and not some weird engineering constraint. So it’s a bad and maybe unethical user experience.<p>Why couldn’t it be: “Thank you for using Dropbox, you have access to your 1t (or whatever) until X date, after that your files will stop syncing unless you do Y. Come back any time!”
Audible has something similar: they require that you use up all your credits before cancellation is even possible, so that is obstacle #1. Then they ask for reason and sub-reason, and give you either a $20 coupon if you say the reason is because it's too expensive, or a 3 months praise on your account if you say you can't catch up to one book a month.<p>Pretty clever. But having to choose 6 books immediately at the point of cancellation sucks
I cancelled my New York Times digital subscription this year. It required a phone call and talking to two individuals. Of course I couldn't do it the very first time I tried because I wasn't in a position to make a phone call at the time.<p>I find Dropbox's approach middle of the road. I think the thing that annoys me the most is that the button that does what you are specifically trying to do is de-emphasized. It shows a lack of respect.
It is also interesting how the handle forced downgrades. I just lost some GBs from previous promotions (like Dropbox Campus Cup) and are now stuck with the following situation:<p>- all files are still there, downloads are possible<p>- they disabled syncing between devices and sharing<p>- in case of upgrading to a paid plan I can continue as before
I'm not sure whether it's better than usual that they actually do let you cancel online, or worse that they make you drill through apparently 20 screens or so of trying to get you not to cancel, answering questions, and finding de-emphasized buttons to click on. Thinking about it, I think that's the biggest obstacle to signing up to more services - not that I'll miss the money, but that it's going to be a royal PITA to cancel when I decide to.<p>I should give props to Google Play's subscription system for making the cancel interface work well. I subscribed to HBO Go for a few months to watch some shows, and wanted to cancel when I was done and didn't see anything else I wanted to watch. I just clicked one button in the play store, and it cancelled the renewal right away AND also kept my access active until the end of the period I already paid for. That's much better than I expected, and I will have much less worries about subscribing to things on the Play store in the future.<p>But yes, please go away "retention mind hacks".
I still love how netflix handles cancelling subscriptions. settings -> cancel subscription -> are you sure? -> done and done. Feel free to re-subscribe anytime. They'll have kept your watching progress and personal recommendations safe in the meantime.<p>No weird psychological tricks to get you to not cancel, just a button and a confirmation.
I feel the downgrade flow could still be shorter (fewer steps) without affecting the amount of information provided on the downgrade or the level of influencing that happens in these screens to get the user to stay.