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Tell HN: Lemonade insurance billing dark pattern

14 points by meltyness ↗ HN
Lemonade is a "SaaS-era Renter's Insurance company" with a flashy app, etc.

Just discovered two things:

1.) On page 48 of the fine print PDF they ship out, they mention that monthly payments cost an extra 16% over the basic policy.

2.) The only way to change to annual is a button buried in the chat scripts provided by the virtual assistant.

3.) After the "change to annual" task automatically fails, there is no fall-through to support. It just fails.

Welcome to the brave new world of AI-enabled customer support.

No I didn't carefully investigate the 48 page rider on this, I was too busy with the 300 page rider that came along with my lease agreement that was mostly badly copyedited boilerplate.

5 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 25.7 ms ] thread
websap
WTF! Anyway to take them to consumer court over this?
beojan
Which state are you in? My annual premium is 12 times the monthly premium (all on the first page) and there's no 16% mentioned on page 48.
switch007
Reminds me of the UK where it used to be very common (maybe prior to the last crash) to simply pay for all insurance monthly. These days it's very common to sign credit agreements and pay 20-30% APR on monthly payments. Crazy.
prepend
What’s the upside to buying from this service?

Insurance is already horrible with bad customer service. I can’t imagine wanting to have an app to deal with as well.

I think insurance is something that I don’t want to deal with a company less than 50 years old. There’s too much risk for a new company to pay out super high, generate social media buzz and then enshitten with PR to control social media and customer blowback.

anonymoose4
When I bought a house in 2019 in an area with generally expensive homeowners insurance, Lemonade was the cheapest quote that I got by a wide margin. While I see other people in my area with traditional insurers complaining about having their premiums double or getting dropped completely, Lemonade has done one 15% raise on me in the last 4 years. Never had to make a claim though, so hopefully I don't regret it.