Tell HN: Pluralsight and the dark-pattern of auto-renewals
For anyone considering subscribing to Pluralsight, be aware that they will not inform you of their auto-renewal policy, and will charge you once your subscription is up for annual renewal without warning. In my case, this auto-renewal has cost me $300.
This is a serious dark-pattern and I'm surprised companies still employ it. It's so short-sighted. I emailed their support and they offer a "promotional" $50 refund as a token.
Are there any other companies that do this? In contrast, Egghead.io (which in a similar space) sends an email in advance warning you of the renewal as well as how to cancel it.
125 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadIs that every time they charge you? Or just after the end of the trial? I think it should be a law (or at least an ethical standard) to email all customers in advance of automated billing (or at least have a 24 hour cooling off period after such a charge).
Is your beef with them because they didn't email you to let you know they were going to bill you for renewal?
Do what I do. Never trust a company. Whenever you sign up for a recurring service or a free trial, add an event to your personal calendar that reminds you to cancel. Or use a gift card with a limited balance.
Adding dates to the calendar and using giftcard/credit card are both good suggestions for the future.
Cancel right after signing up for annual. Day it will terminate or day prior, can’t remember which, you’ll receive a “hey, don’t let your access expire” email and then you can either sign back up again or let it lapse.
My only gripe with namecheap is that sometimes I have to solve a captcha to login.
"This is a friendly reminder that we are going to charge your MasterCard [last four digits] on October 16, 2019, for the next year of your subscription".
Reminder 3 months out from renewal (& IIRC nearer the time too). Nice to see a company with belief enough in their product that they expect you to renew on that basis rather than through forgetfulness.
SaaS companies are also heavily incentivized to make it harder for you to cancel a trial. Yes, if you get down to it this is not in your interest but also it ends up being a relatively positive tradeoff. You can either have free, no commitment trials with autorenew and all the economic activity that they bring (probably hundreds of thousands of jobs, hundreds of great, useful products) or you can have no autoconvert and also basically no tech sector. I suggest you set up a calendar reminder when you sign up for a free trial or use a temporary credit card (many solutions are a quick search away).
I just find something very unfair about a policy that doesn't warn you about a significant annual renewal coupled with the fact you aren't warned about it nor is it refundable (even if you immediately contact support). It feels like a very deliberate design. As I mentioned, other services have a much more honest and open approach to this, where they email a couple of days in advance warning you about the charge.
But maybe I'm just naive in this instance and should assume companies will do it (so plan around it)
I had a subscription I'd paid for and then I changed companies. My new Company provided a subscription. So I called up and they refunded me the prorated subscription.
I see you emailed customer support, but I'd instead call them. You'll probably have better luck with a human listening. Maybe not but it's worth a try for $300.
An Email should have done it. It's crazy if you do call them and it works, but sometimes that does the trick.
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2536257
Ugh, I remember now how gross that felt at the time, to realize I was locked into the contract, couldn't cancel, and that the same thing was likely to happen again next year, because they built it that way on purpose. Blech.
After the reps gets back from their smoke break, rest assured suddenly they are able to proceed with the request.
Take the money you dogs; it's the last you'll get.
Who is screwing over who here?
As far as Adobe goes, what part of "7 days free, then US$20.99/mo" do you find hard to understand?
Here's what you don't want to hear: You were acting negligent and irresponsible. You paid the price. Worst of all, you didn't seem to learn anything from it. You're here complaining that companies shouldn't take your money when you agree to give it to them, because you can't be trusted to actually read the contracts that you enter. It's embarrassing.
I mean, why stop at 1 year? Why not move free trial users to a 100 year contract with a $10,000 early termination fee? A certain percentage of users won't read the fine print--easy money!
When you enter a contract, you need to read the fine print. In this case, you didn't even read the bold print that said it'll cost you money. You have no one to blame but yourself.
> I mean, why stop at 1 year? Why not move free trial users to a 100 year contract with a $10,000 early termination fee?
Because a software subscription running over a period of 100 years would almost certainly be considered an "unfair term" and "unreasonable" under contract law.
Besides that, there are laws governing how products can be advertised, you can't display one price and then hide excessive extra fees in the fine print.
> A certain percentage of users won't read the fine print--easy money!
A certain percentage of users don't read anything at all. There's lots of sleazy companies out there, looking for fools to part from their money. It's usually perfectly legal, because the same laws that make contracts possible make exploitation possible. You can't have one without the other.
I lost well over $1000 to them before I discovered it and cancelled. Have fun getting a refund as well. In short, avoid.
Further, when someone is fundamentally dissatisfied with a service, you either refund them or you have profited by misrepresentation. In spite of a messaged commitment from them to refund the money, I have not received any notification that it has been refunded.
The good news is that when a company's culture sucks that much, it is ripe for disruption.
https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...
Taking advantage of someone being forgetful is sleazy.
We give cash to small volunteer-run charities where we know that 100% of the money raised goes to the cause in question.
Looking at Oxfam, it's 10% admin and 7% fundraising [1], which doesn't seem too bad given their global reach.
Admittedly their reputation has taken a bit of a tumble due to the scandals.
[1] https://www.oxfam.org.uk/donate/how-we-spend-your-money
Ideally I won't allow any budget for advertising, because that will just move money from one charity to another.
Alternatively I would only donate to the top of Give Well.
If you want to give to a charity because you heard about it on the street, at least try to give the money directly and cut the middle man.
`Meetup.com` did that to me once too. Seems companies are fine with this just to renew subscription because who bothers to get it cancelled.
unlike all the other examples, you normally never want to pay for meetup.com if it is not a longterm subscription. it makes no sense otherwise, unless you have some weird corner case of needing to manage a large group for a short time, but then dissolve it afterwards.
I have had to write an angry email to a paper because they though they could get away with only doing phone unsubcribing (when they did signups just fine online).
yeah, these companies really like to take advantage of my adhd too.
I chatted once with a friend in the non profit space about a service that let people donate online anonymously to charities. She didn't think the idea was a good one because, just like for businesses, there's a lot of value in knowing who your donors (customers in the business scenario) are for non profits. They get additional income from selling lists, they want to reach out and build a relationship (especially recurring donations).
It makes sense to me from an organizational standpoint, but I too wish there was an easy way to do one off donations.
As a counterpoint, I read somewhere that Bill Gates advice about donating was to focus on one to three charities and really get involved and knowledgeable about the space, rather than drop $20 on 10 random charities. It helps both the charities you pick (focus, more money, longer term commitment) and the ones you don't (they don't spend money trying to get you to donate further when you aren't really committed).
Well, of course, but the things they use that knowledge for are bad for me.
> They get additional income from selling lists
OK, then they're already my enemy.
> they want to reach out and build a relationship (especially recurring donations)
Ah, there's a word for people who try to build a relationship with you in order to repeatedly get money off you: "Scammers."
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[0] - I'm bitter about this wrt. banks in Poland. I should be able to view all recurring payments that pull money from my account in a single place in a web interface, and cancel them from there. Alas, the banks are happy to send out my money, but offer no way for me to see a list of recurring payments.
There was nothing in the emails they sent saying that auto-renew was set up. The way I read the expiration warnings was that it would, in fact, expire, which I was fine with. Thankfully support was very helpful in refunding the charge and canceling the account.
Chargebacks also cost providers money on top of the refund, which disincentives their shitty refund policy.
I run a SaaS company (with a great refund policy) and am part of many SaaS startup groups and it's standard practice to basically refund anyone who asks.
The refund costs way less than the damage to your brand / negative reviews.
There are a few others if you search SaaS on Facebook, but that's the best/biggest one.
Many of devs might already know Visual Studio offers free 1-month (it was 3-months before) of Pluralsight, I'm not sure if you need to sign up with your CC now, but it's a nice deal. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/dev-essentials/
I have to agree - if you make it hard to cancel your service I think you're losing money. We're kinda seeing this a lot on iOS, where subscriptions and the process of carrying those over after a limited free trial are very, very shady.
It's a shame, because you want those dollars earned - and if I decide your product isn't right for me and you make it hard to leave, then by proxy you've made it almost impossible for me to come back.
People do this because it works, they pack their T&C full of arbitration terms and other bullshit like that.
And that makes sense; letting a domain name lapse absent explicit instruction is generally the wrong thing to do.
Plus there are autorenew grace periods, so the saner thing is to keep the domain around and then delete it if the registrant objects (and then they get their money back).
I've caught two unintended renewals and cancelled a lot of pre-approved payment authorizations. Out of 20 authorizations, only Google and Valve were legit recurring payments, all other just set it up after a one-time purchase.
Nobody help you on pluralsight if youre stuck