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.
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 phone number of someone to call to cancel (remember phone calls?!). They put the hard sell to stay.
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.
This is a dark pattern usually dying companies like to follow. Why? Because, if you are confident of the value you provide to your customer, you don't need to be so aggressive about not letting them go. Yes, retention is an important KPI, but trust and transparency are even more important than anything else, so companies that offer little value and can't keep up with competition usually do this because they know they are dying.
A little while ago, I noticed the dark pattern that dropbox uses and showed it to my friend while talking about dark patterns. Turns out he was in charge of his university for selecting a good vendor for file storage. He saw it and immediately said 'fuck that' and went for another vendor instead. You see, this is how dark patterns shoot you in the foot - the cost of trust and transparency is even higher. In this case, dropbox lost significant money that they could have otherwise won.
Besides, In this day and age, there is literally no value that dropbox offers to its users. Their competitors offer way more value for similar price points and the experience with dropbox isn't even that good. All they have is their brand name, which will also be gone soon after they've tortured their customers with these dark patterns.
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.
This happened to me too with NYT. 20 minutes on the phone with some poor woman whose compensation I'm sure depended in part on convincing me not to cancel.
I was really surprised because they generally have a good reputation as an organization. I'll never let them get their hands on my payment details again.
Happened to me too. Guy actually laughed at me when I refused a six-months-for-free-if-you-stay option. In that instant I committed to never giving the NYT another dime of my money.
Another one is the ACLU. Easy to start, damn near impossible to stop without just canceling your card. All I wanted to do is change to a different card, but they ignore me. Great way to ruin your reputation.
Fascinating. This retention tactic is usually pitched as a successful last-ditch attempt to retain subscription customers, but it comes at a hidden cost to the brand - and losing repeat buyers like yourself.
Comcast, Blue Apron, credit cards, etc. do it but I didn't think publishers were getting to this point.
In France, on of the biggest journals, Le Monde, is also a hassle to unsubscribe. Subscribing is very easy, just enter credit card online. But for unsubscribing, you have to send a registered letter with recorded delivery. This is a hassle, you have to go to the post station, and is also pretty expensive (around 5-10 euros), which is almost the price for 1 month subscription to the journal. I find this unbelievable that you can't unsubscribe online (even for the online edition).
I just canceled my NYT subscription based on this comment. I was able to do so by logging into my account, following the "Cancel" link, then choosing the online chat option. It wasn't as easy as an automatic cancellation, but it wasn't terrible. Here's the transcript:
Isaiah: Hello Jay and thank you for contacting The New York Times! My name is Isaiah and I will be able to make any changes to your account today! One moment while I pull up your account.
Isaiah: I have located your digital account and I would like to personally thank you for being a Basic digital subscriber with the account number (XXXXXXXX)
Isaiah: If you don't mind me asking, what led you to cancel? I would love to gain your insight and see if there are any potential issues that I may resolve for you.
Jay: Please cancel my subscription.
Isaiah: May I ask why you wish to cancel?
Jay: I decline to answer that. Please cancel my subscription.
Isaiah: please note that leaving will put you back at 5 free articles per month and you will no longer have unlimited access to our content. Any saved Cooking recipes will stay saved but you will not be able to view them until you subscribe again.
Jay: I understand. Please cancel my subscription.
Isaiah: I understand your concerns. Because your readership is important to us, I'd like to extend a special offer for $2 per week for 1 year.
Jay: No thank you. Please cancel my subscription.
Isaiah: You will continue to enjoy all your subscription benefits for the rest of your billing cycle, which ends on February 07, 2019. Unfortunately we cannot issue any credits or refunds for the remainder of this billing cycle.
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:
Hello,
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.
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:
- Username and email address associated with your Udacity User Account (if different from the one you provided in your initial request);
- Online Courses currently or previously enrolled in;
- Approximate date of User Account registration;
- Country of residence; and
- 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.
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.
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.
If you have any questions about this request please see our Privacy Policy or let us know.
> 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
That strikes me as really extreme. If I had an Udacity account and someone tried to delete it, I would be annoyed, but I wouldn't seek to press criminal charges against them.
This is unacceptable - if an authenticated login is good enough to change account details and sign-in info, why isn't it good enough to close an account?
I'm not an Udacity customer, and after reading your account I never will be - I loathe these scummy tactics.
Wow, thank you so much for bringing this to light. Our org is literally in the process of signing up for their enterprise product but I can not in good conscience allow it to proceed after seeing that, it is unprofessional on so many levels. I would expect this kind of contractual bullshit from an NY landlord, not from an education platform.
I know they wont miss our 220ish users, but I hope enough individuals see your post to put a dent in their numbers.
> 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.
Didn't windows 95 popularize the idea of the trashcan - temporary deletion - 20+ years ago? Don't many db tools support the idea of "soft deletes"?
"Hey - once we do this, you can't get anything back, ever, immediately, it's all gone. For good. But we're going to keep stuff forever that you can never see, and we won't tell you what it is. But you can't have your stuff back, ever. It's gone."
Even my "offline" university had the idea of "not paid", "suspended", "active", etc. Keep me on file, and I'll pay again in 12 months when I take more classes, etc.
These days if I want to "delete" an account, I'll just change my email address and password associated with that account. I take help of temporary email providers. Also, I write gibberish in place of my profile data.
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.
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.
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.
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 why" gave me flashbacks to that nightmare Comcast cancellation call[0].
At what point can you just state something like the following?
> I am recording this phone call. I am terminating our service contract, and have communicated this by mail as well as verbally as we speak. Any further attempts to charge me for this service I have cancelled shall be disputed and reported to the police for attempted fraud. Good day.
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.
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.
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.
By the way, for those who don't want to use one of the existing providers [1] and don't want to operate their own server either: Hetzner started their Nextcloud as a service recently:
I'll take that flow any day over a company that makes you call or email to cancel.
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.
Cox is the worst. The prices magically increase every few months and it always takes a phone call to get them back down to what you originally thought they were.
Phone employees must be given drop-dead quotas or something because they really resist not being able to do their won’t-you-please-stay spiels at cancellation time, no matter what you say.
Once when cancelling an AmEx card, I TOLD the agent immediately “I am cancelling my card, and I decline in advance any offers you make to keep me on this card”; she still 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 said you just wanted to cancel BUT...”. (Really?!? That means you know I don’t want it and you know you are wasting my time, yet you choose to waste it anyway! Is your manager behind you or something?)
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 many cable choices or card choices for example, so how exactly am I going to storm off and never return?
The agent is probably required to walk you through them. The people who have taken away the agent's power to actually make your customer experience a happy one will never directly encounter the consequences of their decisions.
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 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.
Exactly. If you're able to document your cancellation process using only screen recording software, you're still in the top 10% of convenient cancellation experiences.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] mrspeaker|7 years ago|reply
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 phone number of someone to call to cancel (remember phone calls?!). They put the hard sell to stay.
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.
[+] [-] neya|7 years ago|reply
A little while ago, I noticed the dark pattern that dropbox uses and showed it to my friend while talking about dark patterns. Turns out he was in charge of his university for selecting a good vendor for file storage. He saw it and immediately said 'fuck that' and went for another vendor instead. You see, this is how dark patterns shoot you in the foot - the cost of trust and transparency is even higher. In this case, dropbox lost significant money that they could have otherwise won.
Besides, In this day and age, there is literally no value that dropbox offers to its users. Their competitors offer way more value for similar price points and the experience with dropbox isn't even that good. All they have is their brand name, which will also be gone soon after they've tortured their customers with these dark patterns.
[+] [-] bennylope|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caconym_|7 years ago|reply
I was really surprised because they generally have a good reputation as an organization. I'll never let them get their hands on my payment details again.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|7 years ago|reply
Another one is the ACLU. Easy to start, damn near impossible to stop without just canceling your card. All I wanted to do is change to a different card, but they ignore me. Great way to ruin your reputation.
[+] [-] sxates|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bduerst|7 years ago|reply
Comcast, Blue Apron, credit cards, etc. do it but I didn't think publishers were getting to this point.
[+] [-] elcomet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|7 years ago|reply
Isaiah: Hello Jay and thank you for contacting The New York Times! My name is Isaiah and I will be able to make any changes to your account today! One moment while I pull up your account.
Isaiah: I have located your digital account and I would like to personally thank you for being a Basic digital subscriber with the account number (XXXXXXXX)
Isaiah: If you don't mind me asking, what led you to cancel? I would love to gain your insight and see if there are any potential issues that I may resolve for you.
Jay: Please cancel my subscription.
Isaiah: May I ask why you wish to cancel?
Jay: I decline to answer that. Please cancel my subscription.
Isaiah: please note that leaving will put you back at 5 free articles per month and you will no longer have unlimited access to our content. Any saved Cooking recipes will stay saved but you will not be able to view them until you subscribe again.
Jay: I understand. Please cancel my subscription.
Isaiah: I understand your concerns. Because your readership is important to us, I'd like to extend a special offer for $2 per week for 1 year.
Jay: No thank you. Please cancel my subscription.
Isaiah: You will continue to enjoy all your subscription benefits for the rest of your billing cycle, which ends on February 07, 2019. Unfortunately we cannot issue any credits or refunds for the remainder of this billing cycle.
[+] [-] sambucini|7 years ago|reply
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:
Hello,
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.
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:
- Username and email address associated with your Udacity User Account (if different from the one you provided in your initial request);
- Online Courses currently or previously enrolled in;
- Approximate date of User Account registration;
- Country of residence; and
- 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.
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.
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.
If you have any questions about this request please see our Privacy Policy or let us know.
Thanks for your understanding.
Udacity Legal Team
[+] [-] saghm|7 years ago|reply
That strikes me as really extreme. If I had an Udacity account and someone tried to delete it, I would be annoyed, but I wouldn't seek to press criminal charges against them.
[+] [-] GordonS|7 years ago|reply
I'm not an Udacity customer, and after reading your account I never will be - I loathe these scummy tactics.
[+] [-] cde-v|7 years ago|reply
I know they wont miss our 220ish users, but I hope enough individuals see your post to put a dent in their numbers.
[+] [-] eiurafhlfie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrootabega|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowercased|7 years ago|reply
Didn't windows 95 popularize the idea of the trashcan - temporary deletion - 20+ years ago? Don't many db tools support the idea of "soft deletes"?
"Hey - once we do this, you can't get anything back, ever, immediately, it's all gone. For good. But we're going to keep stuff forever that you can never see, and we won't tell you what it is. But you can't have your stuff back, ever. It's gone."
Even my "offline" university had the idea of "not paid", "suspended", "active", etc. Keep me on file, and I'll pay again in 12 months when I take more classes, etc.
[+] [-] mkbkn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
That sounds like a complex process to avoid deleting the wrong things, but maybe not the same for stopping a subscription?
[+] [-] yayadarsh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wlll|7 years ago|reply
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.
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.
[+] [-] Tomte|7 years ago|reply
The buttons were jumping around. Sometimes the left one was for cancelling, sometimes the right one, sometimes it was a few centimeters lower.
I love my Kindle, but without that my Amazon account itself would be in real danger.
[+] [-] shortj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrhappyunhappy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graedus|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service
[+] [-] nightcracker|7 years ago|reply
> I am recording this phone call. I am terminating our service contract, and have communicated this by mail as well as verbally as we speak. Any further attempts to charge me for this service I have cancelled shall be disputed and reported to the police for attempted fraud. Good day.
[+] [-] james_s_tayler|7 years ago|reply
I think I'd just be obnoxious and say cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel...
I barely obey the social contract as it is.
[+] [-] Asooka|7 years ago|reply
This is where you copy-paste the timecube website and tell them you don't want to do business with a company that cannot understand 4-corner time.
[+] [-] NamTaf|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mooman219|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] heavymark|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ar_lan|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Walkman|7 years ago|reply
https://nextcloud.org/
https://rclone.org/webdav/#nextcloud
[+] [-] arendtio|7 years ago|reply
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/nextcloud
I haven't tested it yet, as I am running my Nextcloud on my own server, but I found their offer quite compelling.
[1]: https://nextcloud.com/signup/
[+] [-] GordonS|7 years ago|reply
It supports disks, AWS API-compatible blob storage and Ceph and OpenStack Swift as storage backends.
You can also mount Seafile folders as drives using Webdav or a FUSE extension.
I highly recommend it!
Disclaimer: no affiliation, just a Dropbox refugee that's been very happy with Seafile for ~3 years
[+] [-] joshfraser|7 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] briandear|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crysin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glitcher|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winduptoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rabidrat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runjake|7 years ago|reply
Plan B is to use virtual credit card numbers, such as https://privacy.com preferably with a bogus name.
Too many tech companies are shady.
[+] [-] makecheck|7 years ago|reply
Once when cancelling an AmEx card, I TOLD the agent immediately “I am cancelling my card, and I decline in advance any offers you make to keep me on this card”; she still 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 said you just wanted to cancel BUT...”. (Really?!? That means you know I don’t want it and you know you are wasting my time, yet you choose to waste it anyway! Is your manager behind you or something?)
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 many cable choices or card choices for example, so how exactly am I going to storm off and never return?
[+] [-] fnordsensei|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbrown|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numbers|7 years ago|reply
Thanks for posting this.
I've never signed up for Dropbox Pro but this is off-putting because their product seems pretty well rounded in most cases.
[+] [-] callinyouin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fitzroy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevsim|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ShakataGaNai|7 years ago|reply
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.
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.
[+] [-] jordanbeiber|7 years ago|reply
I had a yearly plan and had moved everything off to my own NAS in the last month before subscription renewal.
Was very surprised to see an additional year billed to my account!
Well annoying, and quite ugly.