If it's harder to leave than it is to join, then I'm not using your stuff. It's mildly condescending and very transparent and so I don't want/need to deal with it. If you believed in your product, you wouldn't do it.<p>I subscribed to the New York Times with a simple one-step "put in your credit card deets". One year later I was going to leave the country so tried to cancel it. After several steps of forms you get the <i>phone number</i> of someone to call to cancel (remember phone calls?!). They put the hard sell to stay.<p>My plans changed, I stayed in the country. I really loved my NYTimes subscription (I miss my crosswords) - but ain't no way I'm signing up again until they make it equally easy to leave as it is to join. I apply that to every company I deal with now.
Retain with pain..<p>The other day I tried to delete my udacity account. No button in settings, I mailed support, they asked my to mail legal (apparently they don't fwd mail..). From legal I received the following response:<p>Hello,<p>We are in receipt of your request to delete your account. We are sorry you want to leave the Udacity family; you will be missed.<p>Before we can proceed with fully processing your request, we need to verify your information. We take these steps to minimize risk to the security of your information and of fraudulent information and removal requests. Specifically, we ask that you provide the following pieces of information:<p>- Username and email address associated with your Udacity User Account (if different from the one you provided in your initial request);<p>- Online Courses currently or previously enrolled in;<p>- Approximate date of User Account registration;<p>- Country of residence; and<p>- A statement under penalty of perjury that all information in your request is truthful and that this is your User Account or that you have the authorization to make the request on behalf of the owner of the User Account.<p>If, after you have provided the above information, we are unable to verify your identity and/or authority to issue the request, we may reach out to you for further verification information.<p>As a reminder, any deletion actions we take in response to your request are not reversible and may result in Udacity (or you) being unable to retrieve information about your account, enrollment, and records of completion. Please also keep in mind that all removals of such information are subject to requirements to maintain certain data in our archives for legal or legitimate business purposes.<p>If you have any questions about this request please see our Privacy Policy or let us know.<p>Thanks for your understanding.<p>Udacity Legal Team
Years ago I needed to cancel a fax service. They refused to allow me to cancel unless I called them up, which I wouldn't do.<p>In the end I just changed all my details to some variation of the phrase "cancel account" except the billing details (which I couldn't change) then did a chargeback every time they charged me.<p>It took them a couple of months to finally get round to cancelling my account (I think it was actually the bank who intervened). It was more effort than just calling the fac company, but I sure as hell wasn't playing their game.
Amazon is the same. I just cancelled Prime yesterday. It took me four or five confirmations that yes, I want to lose the benefits.<p>The buttons were jumping around. Sometimes the left one was for cancelling, sometimes the right one, sometimes it was a few centimeters lower.<p>I love my Kindle, but without that my Amazon account itself would be in real danger.
I actually went through exactly this with Dropbox a couple weeks ago. It took me two tries, the first time I mis-read / fell into one of the dark patterns. I'd made up my mind long before I ever went to the website to cancel and all this did was make me grumpy and justify my decision even more. Clearly it adds to their retention numbers somewhere or it would be dropped, however I will not use dropbox again in the face of such blatant disrespect. It was a great service, but with so many other options out there I have no need to use one that thinks I need to be tricked in to staying.
Ha, not as hard as I expected but still like 4-5 steps with a bunch of dark patterns (highlighting the buttons that don't downgrade, etc). The screen that's like "OK, you want to downgrade, but tell us <i>why</i>" gave me flashbacks to that nightmare Comcast cancellation call[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service" rel="nofollow">https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service</a>
This looked a bit like someone being overly picky, but the the number of times Dropbox presented a deceptive ui got more and more funny. 3 different confirmation pages in a row, and a weak confirmation that you actually cancelled the subscription.<p>I wouldn't put is as "very hard", but they could probably drop the last confirmation page since any value you get by having these pages dramatically falls off after the first.
Anytime I can cancel online, in under a minute I'd consider that easy. Yes, ideally they wouldn't put all those hoops in the way, but far better than most companies that require you to call a phone number during a certain time where you have to spend forever talking to a person who has to read from a script and may get aggressive with you or have to transfer you, or call drops or they say they have cancelled but didn't go through. Like MyFico, Sirius and other big names. Hopefully Dropbox improves but I assume their pages get enough people not to cancel, than the amount of people so angered by it that they decide to never come back that it makes sense for them.
This is how my old gym was (Crunch Fitness), at least several years ago. I moved cities and had forgotten about the subscription until I checked my bank statement - so I called them and asked to cancel. They said I needed to do so in person, or physically mail them some form (wasn't exactly clear on where I get this form from...). Even after being pretty irate and asking for a manager, I got those canned responses.<p>I suppose it was lucky that I was visiting that city the upcoming weekend, so I did end up cancelling in person - but my experience sounded and felt illegal.
Stupid shit like this is the reason I moved everything to my own Nextcloud instance. It's completely free, open source and surprisingly have a BETTER user interface than Dropbox. Rclone can sync to the WebDav interface.<p><a href="https://nextcloud.org/" rel="nofollow">https://nextcloud.org/</a><p><a href="https://rclone.org/webdav/#nextcloud" rel="nofollow">https://rclone.org/webdav/#nextcloud</a>
I'll take that flow any day over a company that makes you call or email to cancel.<p>Recently had a horrible experience with Full Contact. You can sign up with a couple clicks, but you need to email them to cancel. Then they'll sit on your request so you get billed for another month while they're processing it and then they'll kill your plan right away for the month you just paid for. Horrible!
Annoying sure. "Very" hard? No, not in the slightest and is disingenuous to title it that way. Sure their confirmation buttons were the primary action color, and they really drag the process but it was straight forward, just involved reading to make sure the button you were clicking was the right one. It's a bad process definitely, but not very hard or even moderately hard.
This seems like standard fare at almost any company. Cox communications offered me $10 lower per-month Internet when I was cancelling. I told them if they retroactively paid me the $10/month they were over-charging me for years I would stay. This finally ended their attempts to change my mind.
This is why I prefer to handle my app subscriptions through Apple's App Store: easy, transparent (un)subscriptions.<p>Plan B is to use virtual credit card numbers, such as <a href="https://privacy.com" rel="nofollow">https://privacy.com</a> preferably with a bogus name.<p>Too many tech companies are shady.
Phone employees must be given drop-dead quotas or something because they <i>really</i> resist not being able to do their won’t-you-please-stay spiels at cancellation time, no matter what you say.<p>Once when cancelling an AmEx card, I <i>TOLD</i> the agent immediately “I am cancelling my card, and I decline <i>in advance</i> any offers you make to keep me on this card”; she <i>still</i> couldn’t seem to resist interjecting about 3 or 4 time-wasting counter-offers. It was extra annoying when she started prefacing them with “I know you <i>said</i> you just wanted to cancel BUT...”. (Really?!? That means you <i>know</i> I don’t want it and you <i>know</i> you are wasting my time, yet you choose to waste it anyway! Is your manager behind you or something?)<p>I have seen this with everything from cards to cable companies. All I can figure is that these companies simply have too much power. There just aren’t that <i>many</i> cable choices or card choices for example, so how exactly am I going to storm off and never return?
They wont quit pestering me to upgrade. I've never uploaded a single file, but collaborators have shared folders with me. Apparently that means my drive is full and I need to upgrade...
That's what happens when you have a huge growth team.<p>Thanks for posting this.<p>I've never signed up for Dropbox Pro but this is off-putting because their product seems pretty well rounded in most cases.
That looks super annoying (seems like a really good way to get zero return customers), but does anyone remember how difficult it was for people to quit AOL in the (early?) 2000's? Just search for "cancel AOL" on youtube and you will find some pretty incredible accounts of people being straight up harassed by AOL reps to keep their accounts. For some people it took hours arguing with a rep over the phone before they would agree to cancel.
If you live in the USA, Email their support and declare that you've canceled your account with them and refuse to pay anything further. Then contact your credit card company and initiate a charge back. If your CC company wants proof, send them a copy of the email you sent.<p>Every chargeback a company gets costs them money, on top of the money they aren't getting from you. If a company gets a high enough charge back rate, their credit card processing vendor will revoke their services. Fraud/Chargebacks are a MAJOR issue for any company accepting credit cards.<p>If you've made it clear you wish to cancel and are in no other way violating a contract (ex: You signed up for a 1 year subscription billed monthly with Adobe Cloud, ya gotta pay them for the year), then you are free and clear.
Yeah, I actually by accident retained my account by not clicking the last of several ”are you sure” type buttons.<p>I had a yearly plan and had moved everything off to my own NAS in the last month before subscription renewal.<p>Was very surprised to see an additional year billed to my account!<p>Well annoying, and quite ugly.
I signed for Dropbox pro through their iOS app, which means canceling is super easy because the payments are handled by Apple. You can cancel your account by staying entirely inside iOS system preferences menus.<p>And ironically, it may lead to 1 or 2 more clicks than what was shown in the video, but at least there are no dark UI patterns.
I use Privacy[0] for all internet subscriptions. I mentioned this on HN before but it gives me purpose-generated cards for specifics d services like Netflix and Google. When I want to cancel, if the process is even marginally difficult, I just turn the card off — which I was going to do anyways.<p>[0]: Referral link: <a href="https://privacy.com/join/S5U7B" rel="nofollow">https://privacy.com/join/S5U7B</a>
Don't use the form. Use the legal way to quit any contract in your country. For instance that means sending a paper letter to their offices with the postal service confirming that the letter was received. If your contract has a quitting period pay the 3 months or what. Then stop and ignore all the annoying emails and letters they send you. They will not sue, because they would lose.<p>Might cost you $5 for the special letter type, and might cost you 3 more monthly fees than you would be willing to pay otherwise. But this is 100% save in all countries with a working legal system. Of course if they come after you with baseball bats or car bombs, then you probably can't quit their "services" anyways. ;)
It's annoying as hell. Dropbox deleted 50,000 files on our dropbox business account once. I had to go in an manually undelete each folder. There were hundreds of folders. Poof, suddenly gone. After that we were done, had to go through these hoops to cancel.
I'm starting to use privacy.com with all my online accounts. If I really have trouble leaving deleting the vendor locked credit card I used to sign up is an easy way to go that gets the job done.
Audible seems to do memberships right. Cancel at anytime, resume when desired. Works a treat and I frequently go back an rejoin if there's something I'm interested in.
A little over a year ago I spent days and days trying and failing to sign up for a Dropbox Business account.<p>The "Start free trial" button on the website literally did nothing. If I clicked it enough times, I eventually got a poorly worded error asking me to try again in 24 hours. This happened in multiple browsers. I tried many times over the course of several days with no success. I had coworkers try in case it was something specific to my machine or network. They got the same error.<p>I opened a support request and asked if they could help me manually open a Dropbox Business account. No, they couldn't. The best advice they were able to give me was to try clearing my browser cache and cookies (I did; it didn't help).<p>Finally I dug around and managed to find a link directly to a billing form, and was able to sign up by having them start billing me immediately instead of going through a free trial. I signed up for annual billing, naively assuming the per-user annual fee would be pro-rated (like Slack and most other good per-user services do) if our small company hired or lost any employees.<p>During the course of that year I did end up removing two users from our Dropbox Business account. Since we had already paid for the full year up front, I expected the next annual charge to reflect a pro-rated charge. But nope! The automatic renewal paid no attention to the _actual_ number of users on our account, and Dropbox charged us as if those users still existed.<p>Turns out the number of licenses you're billed for has to be managed manually. If you have 10 licenses and 10 users and then remove two users, that doesn't affect the license count. You have to remove two licenses manually. And if you pay up front for a year but remove two licenses halfway through the year? Too bad. No pro-rated reduced charge next year. Better be sure to predict your exact staffing numbers a year in advance next time.<p>Want to add a user halfway through the year when you're already at your license limit? It'll just fail with a cryptic error until you finally realize you need to first go to a different page and manually add a license. And sometimes (like literally as I type this) the Billing page you need to visit to do this is completely broken and just serves up an error that says "Oh hello. Sorry for this little hiccup."<p>Dropbox's core functionality works well and I have no complaints about it, but everything related to billing is so unintuitive and so frequently broken that I wonder whether they even care about it.<p>So yeah, I guess it doesn't surprise me that canceling is hard too.
Call your CC, claim inability to reach business to cancel and request chargeback.<p>This is my action plan #1 when vendor start irritating me with their support or policies.
I don't think this is hard, it is possible online, no phone calls nor paper communication.
In Germany if you want to cancel anything, you need to send personally signed letter three full months in advance.
And most of the things run as two year long contacts. If you miss the the date three months before your contact ends you get another two years automatically.
This was very similar to my experience when cancelling my Amazon Prime account a week ago. It was at least five pages of trying to talk me out of it and the 'continue cancelling' was similarly the more obscure/non-obvious button.<p>It makes it feel like a very shady process without being outright deceptive.
The ONE good thing about Bank of America, and it was only available on their credit cards but not debit cards, and I don't even know if they still offer it: You could generate new credit card numbers on demand, and set a hard spending limit on them, and their expiration date could be set by you.<p>This was pitched by their marketing as a way to make online shopping safer, because even if they did get the card and the expiry date and everything, they couldn't spend more than the limit which you likely already hit when you bought your item. But the hidden feature was it made cancelling difficult services a breeze, because you could just log in to your banking portal and kill the temporary card you made for that service.
It's almost always harder to cancel.
But even worse is if you want to delete your account.<p>I had a subscription that was not lapsed on NORVPN and I wanted to delete my account. Of course I had to contact customer support and after 2-3 emails confirming that yes I actually want to delete my account even if it has an active subscription that I had paid for and no there is no particular reason for it except that I don't use it they actually removed me.<p>It wasn't the end of the world but I would really like a button.<p>Funnily enough their customer service is called "Customer success team". I had to laugh out loud at that.<p>In any case, the worst offender here is probably facebook with their probation pattern.
Also difficult - deleting all the files in your account. It took me days to do it through their web UI, as the delete operation would repeatedly fail after some amount of time. Very poor feedback on what was happening, how long it would take, etc.
If you think this sucks, have a go at deleting your Facebook account.<p>Worse... WhatsApp. When you change phone numbers it prompts you to notify all your friends. But when you delete, it just keeps letting friends message you without letting them know you aren't there, and all you get are notifications that people on WhatsApp are trying to contact you -- but it won't tell you anything more unless you sign up again. Before I had WhatsApp, people couldn't message me through WhatsApp, but once you had it, there's apparently no way to delete it. What if I change my phone number? Is any number in the system just forever in the system. Cool, cool cool cool.
Just thought I'd point out that a lot of the reason companies make it so hard to cancel subscriptions is that it literally is a more "brutal" change for them when it comes to accounting, and what they have to report back to investors.<p>Recurring income is more highly valued than one-off / extraordinary income. Most traditional companies (telecom, banks, even gyms) have been this way, backing off only when forced to by regulation. It's sad, but not surprising to see the newer breed of companies also adopt these practices.
I have been working as a ux consultant for 15 years now, there are two things that are serious problems:
1. Forcing your users into actions they don’t want to take (dark patterns)
2. Having users delete their accounts and data because you didn’t install enough hurdles on their way to the delete button<p>I am actually not very sure what we see here, is it a dark pattern? It could be, but at the size of Dropbox I could easily imagine the problems haveing a way of cancelling to easily could cause. Especially if we are talking about a file space.
This one wins points for comedy, but I've seen worse. NY Times forced me to open an IM chat window with "customer service" and request my cancellation interpersonally through them.
That's definitely over the top (particularly the second "please look at this list of things you're losing" after what looks like a feedback collection page), but it's orders of magnitude easier than cancelling a typical cable/phone/internet subscription or gym membership.<p>My concern is that companies like Dropbox will eventually learn that the reason the companies that are famously hard to end a relationship with are that way is because, in the end, you make more money that way.
Since they solved the problem of "what if file sharing didn't suck?" they now need to solve the problem of "what if cancelling a subscription didn't suck?"
I cancelled Dropbox for Business a few days ago and it wasn't as bad as this video.<p>- I went into settings<p>- Pressed the button to cancel the plan<p>- ~75 words about what would happen to the individual accounts created with the Dropbox for Business plan<p>- One more button saying I still wanted to cancel my account<p>- Three checkboxes confirming that I understand my data would be deleted from Dropbox<p>- Now I could finally cancel<p>It might sound like a lot, but I appreciate that they didn't have any "No I don't wanna be awesome anymore and have 10TB of Dropbox storage" like they did in this video.
There are even worse services where there is no UI to cancel subscriptions. You have to instead email customer support and spend another week explaining why their service sucks.<p>Example: Willow TV
Mealpal doesn't have a cancel subscription option on their app. You have to email them for them to cancel your subscription. Who even does that, smh.
Got this email from them a couple days ago:<p>We’ve noticed you haven’t used your XXX@XXX.com Dropbox account in over one year and have closed your account for you. Devices connected to this account have now stopped syncing. Any remaining files in your account will be subject to deletion.<p>Sincerely,
- The Dropbox Team<p>There goes my files. Fuck dropbox. Stick to google drive.
I don’t mind Dropbox’ effort for trying to make users change the mind (I’m biased as an ex Dropboxer) and maybe the pattern is a little Grey but it only takes you 45 seconds to unsubscribe.. in contrast I has a much much worse experience with “I Done This” (idonethis.com) where I subscribed for me and one of my colleagues but somehow other people in my company that I didn’t know or work with (without me really knowing clearly - not sure what happened) were somehow able to become part of my “team” license and I got a big fat bill from them.. we didn’t even use the product and there was no negotiations whatsoever - not even an invoice section/download option in the product so no way I even had any kind of “receipt” for expense claims - the customer experience and cancellation process was the worst I’ve seen in a long time!! I’m pretty sure I had to email them to cancel in the end as well. Biggest issue was bill shock by new accounts being added to my subscription though. At least with Dropbox if you’ve subscribed in error or have very good reasons they’re usually not too strict on refunds - they try and go the extra mile unlike idonethis.com
When I tried to cancel Britbox, I went to account settings, where I saw a message that said "Please cancel your subscription using the device you used to sign up." I saw this message on my iPhone and my iMac. Who knows or cares where I signed up? I had to phone to cancel my subscription.
ExpressVPN also has a cancel screen like this. It's particularly insidious since they make it look as if the cancellation is confirmed, even though you need to press another grayed-out button to finalize it. They've squeezed 2-3 months of extra payments from me this way.
Dropbox is a publicly traded company: <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DBX/?guccounter=1" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DBX/?guccounter=1</a><p>What do you expect?<p>It's legal obligation to make as much money for the shareholders.
Eww so they have a landing page when you want to cancel. Pretty slimy. If it’s too annoying just give them a chargeback, heck do it the next month if they don’t stop. That will fit the attention of at least their payment processor.
This is the reason why everyone should use privacy.com.<p>No need to cancel anything. You just shut down the payment card that is paying for the service lol. Once they see your card getting declined they will just close the account.
Is there any way to know about this type of thing beforehand?<p>I've always wanted to have a site that showed me "moral" alternatives to websites and such but this type of information is difficult to normalize :)
What’s a good alternative to Dropbox? I have been on pro (plus?) for a few years and was happy with it, but the constant nagging to buy a more expensive plan is really annoying
I just cancelled my Dropbox Pro subscription and was, frankly, taken aback by the many steps I had to go through. It should be as easy to cancel as it is to sign up.
There might be some value in a service where you pay someone else to sit through all the phone calls and jump through all the hoops when canceling another service.
For someone who really wants to quit, it's annoying as hell. For someone who might want to stay, it helps retain them.<p>Which do you think the company cares about more?
Recently, I have noticed that I use the colorless buttons more often than those '.primary' ones. Especially when it comes to GDPR layers.<p>Next time it might be better if the lawmakers would ask someone to design a proper API for them and the browser vendors should care of the GUI instead of the website providers. Otherwise, we will end up again with this superb user experience where every website tries a new pattern to convince you to take their tracking cookies.
This is one of the reasons I try to pay for most things with prepaid credit cards. Not only does it mitigate the risk of me having to change credit cards when their data is stolen, but it makes it very easy to cancel services, simply because there is no money left on the card for them to take.
if it takes more than 30min to cancel a service/account i just call my bank, explain the situation and reject all future transactions from that merchant.
The NYT at least lets you use PayPal. When I wanted to cancel I couldn't even get through to a rep, so I just switched my payment method to PayPal and then deauthorized the recurring payment from PayPal.