19 ms·

Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

• Tomte 8y ago
  Amazon is the same. I just cancelled Prime yesterday. It took me four or five confirmations that yes, I want to lose the benefits. 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.
  • cheschire 8y ago
    just wait till you get closer to the end date of your sub. They will start harassing you on every page load of every product you look at.
    • Tomte 8y ago
      Their page header "you saved XXX Euros last year from YYY orders with free priority shipping" was very effective. Not because I was thinking "wow, I've saved so much money". But because I was thinking "wow, I'm buying too much stuff".
      • JCharante 8y ago
        Now I want to cancel just to see the figures.
        • Tomte 8y ago
          They have nothing to do with cancelling, I just got those messages every now and then on the Amazon home page. But the "In the last year" section of your account's order list is pretty much the same.
    • iscrewyou 8y ago
      Yupp. And they’ll have dark patterns for purchases after you cancel prime. Those pesky engineers tried to charge me on my first post-prime purchase by giving me a $5.99 shipping charge. I was shocked! I knew the item said free shipping available. I checked other options (which were hidden behind a button), and lo and behold there was a free shipping option.
    • dorgo 8y ago
      I removed a lot of useless parts and ads from amazon by using stylus-addon. .scheduled-ad { display: none !important; } .nav-a.nav-hasImage.nav-right { display: none !important; } .nav-fullWidthSubnavFlyout.nav-flyout { display: none !important; } .a-section.a-spacing-none.uilm-section { display: none !important; } .acsUxWidget { display: none !important; } .cr-vote-buttons.cr-vote-component { display: none; } span[data-action="cr-popup"] { display: none; } #regularprice_savings { display: none; } #cbcc_content_container{ display: none !important; } .super-tcg, .dv-product-offer, #nav-swmslot, #ape_Detail_dp-ads-center-promo_Desktop_placement, #heroQuickPromo_feature_div,.iss-ad-row, #amsDetailRight_feature_div,#ape_Detail_customer-reviews-top_Glance_placement,#cm_cr-rvw_summary-ads{ display: none !important; } #nav-upnav{ display:none !important; } .nav-prime-try{ display:none; } .dv-dp-top-banner{ display:none; } .acs-private-brands-container-background{ display:none !important; } .maple-banner{ display:none !important; }
  • jenscow 8y ago
    Thanks for reminding me!
  • rolleiflex 8y ago
    Oh, heads up, you're in for a treat. Amazon will try to tack on a Prime subscription on every order you try to make from now on. They do this with a permanent full-page interstitial (not a pop-up) for ex-Prime users before the order confirmation page whose big green 'continue' button automatically one-click charges your account for a full year of Prime. You have to read down and click the tiny 'no, I don't want these benefits' blue text link in 8px font size to file your order without Prime. I no longer shop from Amazon. The more we accept these kind of indignities, the more they will be forced on us. Let them starve, that's the most powerful message one can send. Edit / More data points: - One more trick up their sleeve: they will default to two-day paid shipping even when you have free shipping available, just so that you'll feel the pain (i.e. the 'worth') of Prime every time you have to pay attention in the last page, and check the right 'free shipping' radio box for every shipment in your order. - For me, the last thing that broke the camel's back was that they were specifically sending shipments to arrive on the last day of the shipment window. As a real example, I ordered a display on Jan 7 to arrive between Jan 14 and Jan 18. They shipped it Jan 17. This is what made me notice this, and it made me look at my past orders. Turns out, they have been doing this consistently, for a while. The purpose of a shipping window is to allow for some slack in the case shipment gets delayed, it is for shipment. If they shipped it a few days before the window, that would be fine. If they shipped it right at the beginning of the window, that would still (arguably) be fine. If you ship in a way that is aiming for as late as possible delivery, that's pretty obvious what you're trying to do. If you're not a Prime customer, your orders might arrive as late as they can make it. They are likely doing this on purpose.
    • aeharding 8y ago
      Pro-tip: Sometimes you can get lucrative deals on Prime during checkout if you don't have prime. For example, I've gotten multiple 1 month free trials, and also the '1 week for 1.99' which you can immediately cancel after placing your order for a $1 refund (if you immediately cancel, not at end of the week). I don't shop at Amazon often, but I've gotten many (read: > 10) Prime shipments over the last year, probably paying a grand total of $3 or so. If I don't have any good Prime offers upon checkout, I'll go to Ebay, find the product, soft by lowest price, and it's usually the same price, or within a dollar or so, and ships a LOT faster than Amazon.com's standard shipping (usually ends up coming from Amazon anyways proxied by the Ebay seller with Prime). I've gone through the Amazon cancellation pages many times. They always keep tweaking it and expanding the process.
  • yread 8y ago
    I've signed up for amazon prime uk and after some time I've canceled it. But somehow my amazon.com prime was still going and it took 6 months before i noticed. After quite some discussions with support they told me they only return last 3 months and that i should chargeback the rest. So I'm one of the few people who chargedback amazon and lived to tell the tale
  • Ayesh 8y ago
    True, Amazon Prime is full of dark patterns when you want to cancel. I got the first two months free (Amazon.de), and at the end of the trial, when I wanted to cancel, they added a month for free, and I accepted the free month. My card was charged regardless and I had to email them to cancel it finally with no option to cancel at the end of this extended trial.
• corbpie 8y ago
  dhouston (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863) anything to say?
• heavymark 8y ago
  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.
• robotmachine 8y ago
  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. It makes it feel like a very shady process without being outright deceptive.
• wasnthere 8y ago
  This is totally retarded - the video shows 4 clicks to cancelling the account - this is hard? The video seems like a cover for advertising the loom product to me
  • arkades 8y ago
    Eh. Loom appears to be some kind of facetime / video teleconferencing product. I wouldn't really imagine a non-competitor bothering to advertise by fake-slamming a non-competing product. Maybe I'm just lacking in imagination.
    • vhiremath4 8y ago
      Hey CTO/co-founder here. I was surprised to hear a Loom video made it to the top of HN today. Can confirm we had no idea/part in this posting. Also, you can think of Loom as a way to very quickly make asynchronous video messages. Whether screen sharing or just your front face.
• sxates 8y ago
  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.
• mmmeff 8y ago
  Eeeeeesh. Let's continue this tradition - companies need to be shamed for pulling this crap. Nice work, OP.
• PanoramaRegex 8y ago
  Very funny indeed. :)
• graedus 8y ago
  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]. [0] https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service
  • james_s_tayler 8y ago
    That is legendarily bad. 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.
    • Simon_says 8y ago
      I'd like to sometimes, too, but I have a feeling they're free to just hang up on abusive customers.
      • james_s_tayler 8y ago
        I don't consider it abusive. Or at least I'm perfectly ok being an "abusive" customer to an abusive company. Bit of a tangent but you know I always really hate telemarketing calls or just people I don't know phoning me generally because sometimes it's very hard to tell spam calls from the 1 out of 10 times it's a legit call you actually need to take. So I figured out a trick that works ok-ish. I answer the call and I say nothing. I wait for the other side to speak. Often it's a confused "hello???". If I don't recognize your voice and/or you don't introduce yourself and state your business I effectively screen you without giving you license to launch into your sales pitch. So far it has been a good compromise. Sales people on the street trying to heckle me often get incredulous, well a minority but it happens, when I walk by completely ignoring their existence. It's like... I know it's in the social contract that if someone addresses you you are supposed to respond, but I crossed that clause out before signing because I knew it would be abused like this. People that don't know you that approach you out of the blue either want your time, your money, or your body. I don't owe them shit and especially not the time of day. The exception to this rule is that some people are tourists that are a little stuck and need help. It's pretty easy to delineate those cases and I almost always help. I dunno. I find the world abusive fullstop. So I just give it the fewest possible avenues through which to abuse me and don't go down the ones that I can see lead to abuse. I feel no need to feel badly about the way I behave in this regard and am ok with people thinking I'm an asshole for doing it.
• mooman219 8y ago
  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.
• mrspeaker 8y ago
  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.
  • WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
    privacy.com is probably what you want. You're making it a pain in the butt to cancel? That card is no longer valid.
    • cschneid 8y ago
      Remember that this is not cancelling, and some companies can and will sell your bad debt to collection agencies. You don't get out of contracts just by ghosting on them.
      • maz1b 8y ago
        Can you expand further on this?
        • deleted 8y ago
          [deleted]
        • fencepost 8y ago
          If you have a contract for a service, quite often simply stopping paying does not end the contract - it just builds up charges and past-due fees. If you stop paying your electricity bill, the utility doesn't cut you off immediately - they keep providing service (availability of electricity, even if you're not using any because you flipped the circuit breakers) and charges keep accruing. Eventually services will be cut off, but contractually you're likely responsible for charges up to that point and the companies involved may end up selling that debt to collection agencies (often for pennies on the dollar).
• cameldrv 8y ago
  It took four clicks.
  • strictnein 8y ago
    Yeah, that's the point. Not the dark patterns where there were 4 options presented way down a page to the user and only one would allow them to continue to something they had already indicated they would like to do.
• FVIIIvWF 8y ago
  The process is quite convoluted, but at least they didn’t offer 50% discount when you tried to cancel.
  • the_watcher 8y ago
    Hulu used to do this, but they'd give a free month. All I had to do was remember to find the cancellation flow once a month and I got it for free for almost a year.
• callinyouin 8y ago
  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.
  • fitzroy 8y ago
    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.
  • kevsim 8y ago
    Agree. I remember Xbox Gold was a pig to cancel back in the day as well.
• barking 8y ago
  As a counter example I recently cancelled a subscription to premiersports in the UK, iirc it was a two click process.
• grav 8y ago
  I was expecting a 500 server error.
• numbers 8y ago
  That's what happens when you have a huge growth team. 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.
• post_break 8y ago
  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.
  • Zecar 8y ago
    Dropbox deleted my honeymoon photos on my wife's account. They also deleted my account a few months later. I wouldn't trust Dropbox with a swap file.
    • toomuchtodo 8y ago
      I suddenly have the urge to backup my ~800GB of data in Dropbox somewhere else.
    • rrdharan 8y ago
      They have an undeletion button (and they send you a notice about bulk deletions). They also retain and let you recover accidentally deleted files for 30 days. Without more detail it's hard to find these claims credible.
  • GordonS 8y ago
    I used to use Dropbox for syncing between machines, and had to do the same thing a few years ago. Utterly insane that you still have to manually undelete folders one-by-one. Also insane was the crap customer support (not sure if it's better for business accounts?) - it was all forum based, and you were lucky to get a response. In this case I did get a response, saying that one of the machines hooked up to the account must have deleted the files due to a conflict (it most certainly did not, and I'd said as much in my original post). Aside from this I had 2 other problems with Dropbox: 1. On startup, it would render my machine unusable for over 1 hour. Now, it was syncing from 5400 RPM spinning rust, but still - there are good solutions that don't require hashing every file on the drive with the crappest and slowest possible hash implementation (USN change journal, file system minifilters). 2. Despite only syncing between 2 machines, there were frequent, unexplained 'sync conflicts' that resulted in duplicate copies of file (or sometimes data loss). These conflicts were not even discoverable in the Dropbox UI - you'd only see them if you looked in the folder and say the extra 'conflict' files Oh, and they sent me a ridiculous number of emails after cancelling my Pro account. I cancelled in March 2016, and they regularly spammed me until October 2018. Only some of the emails I received over that time included an 'unsubscribe' link, and despite using those I did get, they didn't stop the emails - pretty scummy behaviour. So, poor product, poor customer service, and scummy tactics. Not their biggest fan... Nowadays I use Seafile, hosted in a Docker container on a low-powered Azure VM, backed by Azure Bloc Storage. Works flawlessly, and I highly recommend it. I understand this isn't a solution for the general population, but if you're technically minded (this is HN; you are), it's really easy to setup. You can use VM-mounted disks or AWS API-compatible block storage (Azure Blob Storage isn't, but I have another container running Minio, which acts as a proxy between the Azure API and Azure Blob Storage - it was plug-and-play, just working OOTB)
• sand500 8y ago
  I think the real solution is to use a one time use credit card number which you can deactivate if its too hard to cancel a free trial.
• sambucini 8y ago
  Retain with pain.. 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 8y ago
    > 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.
    • fencepost 8y ago
      Their concern is probably someone deleting somebody else's account, along with all record of courses completed, etc. Is it possible to have an Udacity account if you're not actually paying them? If so, "account removed" and "unpaid account" are very different things and the transition between them is one-way.
• dependsontheq 8y ago
  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 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.
  • justinclift 8y ago
    > I have been working as a ux consultant for 15 years now > ... > I am actually not very sure what we see here, is it a dark pattern? It sounds like you've been in the grey/black side of the UX industry for too long, and have become a bit institutionalised. eg You're not see things clearly. If possible, maybe take a break from the UX space for a year or so, and do something else? Might help to regain your sense of things. :)
    • henriquemaia 8y ago
      I'm not an UX consultant and what justinclift said makes sense. Maybe the downgrading process could be a bit more streamlined, but, since you're dealing with data, erring on the side of caution does not seem too bad of a strategy.
    • dependsontheq 8y ago
      I’m not defending Dropbox, some parts of this are definitely dark patterns, but I worked for one startup that had decorated their hallways with messages from people who had erroneously deleted their own accounts and data. To do that they had to click 3 times. In the beginning you just had to click “yes” 3 times, we changed it to delete and did the same thing as Dropbox using the other UX color so people would not just click but read and think. Dropbox is used in situations where I could easily imagine scores of user keeping valuable data on it and forgetting about his data, forcing them through a process seems prudent.
• shortj 8y ago
  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.
  • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    What are you looking to use next? I've thought about a raid NAS but have not brought myself to going through with it.
    • ezrast 8y ago
      Syncthing is designed for decentralized syncing, but I've forced it into a hub-and-spoke model by running one instance on a cheap VPS, with my client machines configured to connect to only that with all the discovery/relay features turned off. It's been painless to administer so far - the "server" has been running without restart since I set it up 18 months ago and I've had to fiddle with "client" settings maybe once or twice in that time. Then again, I don't put it under much stress - mostly documents and source code, no multimedia.
      • toomuchtodo 8y ago
        Is there a one-click docker image or other VM one can run as the announcer/tracker for Syncthing?
    • eafkuor 8y ago
      I'm not a power user, but sync.com works quite well for me and is relatively cheap
• znpy 8y ago
  Just disable automatic payments from your paypal account and/or bank or card issuer and they'll cancel it for you! EASY! /s
• er0k 8y ago
  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.
• wlll 8y ago
  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.
  • redler 8y ago
    Finally the killer application for Google Duplex.
  • xster 8y ago
    I think it costs them a transaction fee from the credit card company each time too and affects their future ability to use the merchant network when they get too many chargebacks.
    • PerfectElement 8y ago
      With Stripe, it's $15 for each dispute.
    • munk-a 8y ago
      Unfortunately it can also really seriously effect your credit rating, but then again anything can do that and credit ratings are silly.
      • ianai 8y ago
        Can it? There shouldn’t be any obligation implicit for monthly subscriptions outside of loans.
        • rootusrootus 8y ago
          You can absolutely be sent to collections for not paying for a service, it happens all the time. As soon as that happens they will report it to the credit bureaus.
• gbrown 8y ago
  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...
• jordanbeiber 8y ago
  Yeah, I actually by accident retained my account by not clicking the last of several ”are you sure” type buttons. 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.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• crysin 8y ago
  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.
• Semaphor 8y ago
  A bit off topic, but as we usually have [pdf] in the title for pdf submissions, can we get [autoplaying fucking video] for autoplaying videos?
• pixelbath 8y ago
  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?"
• _bxg1 8y ago
  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.
• mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  This is infuriating!!! I wasn't planning on cancelling, but seeing this shit now makes me want to cancel. Thanks for giving me a reason.
• bittermang 8y ago
  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. 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.
  • kevindong 8y ago
    The three big banks that offer virtual credit card numbers are: Bank of America, Capital One, and Citi.
• grafporno 8y ago
  This is an ad for useloom.
  • arendtio 8y ago
    In fact, I found their service quite interesting, but for me, it doesn't work without a Firefox version of their extension...
• the_watcher 8y ago
  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. 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.
• rzzzt 8y ago
  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.
• woolvalley 8y ago
  To add to the ancedata pile, cancelling spotify was refreshingly easy and nice. A+ would resubscribe again, once they have homepod support.
• turdnagel 8y ago
  As bad as this is, I'm OK if I don't have to call or fill out a form.
• Walkman 8y ago
  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. https://nextcloud.org/ https://nextcloud.org/ https://rclone.org/webdav/#nextcloud https://rclone.org/webdav/#nextcloud
  • arendtio 8y ago
    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: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/nextcloud 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/ https://nextcloud.com/signup/
    • bubblethink 8y ago
      Interesting. Makes sense at the low end I guess. The more expensive ones are quite similar to their dedicated servers, which gets you compute as well. So you'd be better off rolling it yourself.
      • yread 8y ago
        yes, you can get 130TB RAID6 of 15 disks for 269 a month. But in case you need less...
  • GordonS 8y ago
    Similarly, I switched from Dropbox to Seafile and have never looked back. 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 8y ago
  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!
  • briandear 8y ago
    Constant Contact — same thing.
• juddlyon 8y ago
  We should get a list going of companies doing it right. I recall quitting Basecamp in like 3 clicks and and thank you page.
• glitcher 8y ago
  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.
  • winduptoy 8y ago
    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.
  • rabidrat 8y ago
    That's a great idea, I'm going to use that.
• rgrove 8y ago
  A little over a year ago I spent days and days trying and failing to sign up for a Dropbox Business account. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. So yeah, I guess it doesn't surprise me that canceling is hard too.
  • wj 8y ago
    Calendly also works this way. I guess I can understand it making development a bit easier (not having to tie each charge to an individual user) but they should have a warning that when you delete a user that you should also remove a license if that is your intention.
• ar_lan 8y ago
  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.
• fandango 8y ago
  It's nothing compared to G2A: https://www.pcgamesn.com/how-to-cancel-g2a-shield https://www.pcgamesn.com/how-to-cancel-g2a-shield
• rangibaby 8y ago
  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
• arendtio 8y ago
  Recently, I have noticed that I use the colorless buttons more often than those '.primary' ones. Especially when it comes to GDPR layers. 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.
• fartcannon 8y ago
  Similarly, trying to disable google services on your account is a gigantic pain in the ass. Thank god for Lineage OS.
• amingilani 8y ago
  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. [0]: Referral link: https://privacy.com/join/S5U7B https://privacy.com/join/S5U7B
• ohnope 8y ago
  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. 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.
• vthallam 8y ago
  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.
• runjake 8y ago
  This is why I prefer to handle my app subscriptions through Apple's App Store: easy, transparent (un)subscriptions. Plan B is to use virtual credit card numbers, such as https://privacy.com https://privacy.com preferably with a bogus name. Too many tech companies are shady.
  • macintux 8y ago
    I have long wished someone, ideally Apple, would successfully implement micropayments for news.
    • science4sail 8y ago
      Google Contributor [1] was an attempt, but it never really seemed to have taken off. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
• xj9 8y ago
  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.
  • aeharding 8y ago
    30 minutes? You're quite patient. If it took longer than 5 minutes on the phone I'd probably call my bank.
  • WilliamEdward 8y ago
    Can you run into legal issues with this? If the company still thinks youre using the product/service but not paying? I would like to know because i want to use this strategy.
    • xj9 8y ago
      merchants are always notified of chargebacks and penalized. if a certain percent of your transactions have chargebacks you can have your merchant account cancelled. this may not work if you have a contract, but if the business doesn't make it easy enough to cancel a service agreement they have no right to my money and i'm going to make sure my response affects their bottom line so they pay attention and cancel my account.
• gumby 8y ago
  Note: this is a video; should have [Video] in title.
• jdtang13 8y ago
  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.
• sqldba 8y ago
  “Hard” is a stretch. Annoying maybe.
• tyfon 8y ago
  It's almost always harder to cancel. But even worse is if you want to delete your account. 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. It wasn't the end of the world but I would really like a button. Funnily enough their customer service is called "Customer success team". I had to laugh out loud at that. In any case, the worst offender here is probably facebook with their probation pattern.
• augbog 8y ago
  For someone who really wants to quit, it's annoying as hell. For someone who might want to stay, it helps retain them. Which do you think the company cares about more?
• herodotus 8y ago
  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.
• reconbot 8y ago
  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.
• x775 8y ago
  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.
• gesman 8y ago
  Call your CC, claim inability to reach business to cancel and request chargeback. This is my action plan #1 when vendor start irritating me with their support or policies.
  • eridius 8y ago
    Seems like a great way for the vendor to send you debt to collections.
    • dpedu 8y ago
      I'm not familiar, but this seems unlikely to happen for something as small as a Dropbox bill. Debt collection is a 'regular' business - it's simply uneconomical for a business to pay people to pursue your $9 Dropbox debt.
      • eridius 8y ago
        Maybe for Dropbox, but the parent was speaking of this as a general policy.
      • macintux 8y ago
        They can sell a $50 debt though. (No idea what the low end is but I’ve had $25 debts sold when I lost track of a medical charge.)
    • gesman 8y ago
      What you said is more applicable to gym memberships or cell phone contracts where you actually sign in-person multi-page agreement for 1-2 years conscious slavery. CC chargebacks works just fine for any online business that try to pull a quick one on you and making it artificially hard to cancel/unsubscribe/change services. Most people choose to spend 1-2 hours online try to get hold of someone "who can solve your problem". You CC service dept can do it faster for you by transferring the problem to the other side. I mean - it's always fair to try to solve problem by contracting vendor to have them to honor your legitimate request first. If that doesn't help [quickly and painlessly enough] - then there is a plan B in place.
• butterfi 8y ago
  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.
• curyous 8y ago
  privacy.com breaks the back button in my browser. How do they do that?
• blairanderson 8y ago
  Is there any way to know about this type of thing beforehand? 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 :)
• sandyhatches 8y ago
  Stamps.com requires a PHONE CALL to cancel. PHONE. in 2019.
• ShakataGaNai 8y ago
  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.
• makecheck 8y ago
  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?
  • fnordsensei 8y ago
    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.
• anonymous5133 8y ago
  This is the reason why everyone should use privacy.com. 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.
  • macintux 8y ago
    Others have pointed out that services are allowed to send you to collections. You’re still a subscriber.
• mdekkers 8y ago
  in other words "while you are leaving, let us make sure you will never come back"
• abhisheksp 8y ago
  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. Example: Willow TV
• sigzero 8y ago
  Try moving a domain off Network Solutions. 3 days to send me a computer generated code so I can transfer.
• daniel_iversen 8y ago
  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
• wahjiwah 8y ago
  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.
• j1vms 8y ago
  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. 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.
• scoot_718 8y ago
  1. Cancel payments
• echofavor 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing. You can also share your ideas for free on www.echofavor.com
• dbg31415 8y ago
  If you think this sucks, have a go at deleting your Facebook account. 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.
• cm2187 8y ago
  Does the cancellation involve loss of data? If so I think making it hard is fair.
  • nickm12 8y ago
    It doesn't involve any loss of data, but it could degrade your data safety. If you cancel your subscription, your quota is reduced and, if you're now over quota your desktop client stops syncing. It may also prevent Camera Uploads from working on your phone. So you might delete a photo from your phone assuming it was uploaded to Dropbox but it wasn't because you were over quota.
• webwew 8y ago
  These dark patterns are not good. but this submit is good PR for Loom. At first, I thought someone who works at loom complaining about it.
• simongr3dal 8y ago
  I cancelled Dropbox for Business a few days ago and it wasn't as bad as this video. - I went into settings - Pressed the button to cancel the plan - ~75 words about what would happen to the individual accounts created with the Dropbox for Business plan - One more button saying I still wanted to cancel my account - Three checkboxes confirming that I understand my data would be deleted from Dropbox - Now I could finally cancel 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.
• erikb 8y ago
  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. 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. ;)
• devdimi 8y ago
  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.
• ixacto 8y ago
  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.
• stefek99 8y ago
  Dropbox is a publicly traded company: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DBX/?guccounter=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DBX/?guccounter=1 What do you expect? It's legal obligation to make as much money for the shareholders.
• nothrows 8y ago
  Got this email from them a couple days ago: 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. Sincerely, - The Dropbox Team There goes my files. Fuck dropbox. Stick to google drive.