
Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard - riboflavin
https://www.useloom.com/share/8d148b2be54444909e8408398ab07f83
======
mrspeaker
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.

~~~
bennylope
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.

~~~
towelr34dy
So much this. I LOVE paypal as a user because of it. All my subscriptions go
through it and if it isn't offered via paypal, I'll reconsider.

I love to see a list of all my subscriptions with the ability to unilaterally
cancel my subscription at any time via PayPal... I never even contact the
companies I 'unsubscribe' from... I simply remove their access to my paypal.

~~~
sqldba
Just be careful with this. Some companies will treat this as if it were a
bounced check and keep your debt going.

~~~
benatkin
I wouldn't put it past they NYT to do it. They could say that for privacy
reasons the billing department can't view the last time you were logged into
your account, and boom, they can argue that if they didn't pursue payment, you
could be getting features from your paid account for free.

~~~
hakfoo
Most recurring billing APIs provide some sort of notification or query about
the status. They could reasonably do "for each payment we got yesterday,
extend the expiration date of the associated account."

~~~
ascar
Sure. They could also let you easily cancel online. But they don't want to.
And if you refuse to pay for a subscription contract you entered, but didn't
cancel, you owe them.

------
sambucini
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
> 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
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.

~~~
saghm
> Their concern is probably someone deleting somebody else's account

Yes, that's what I meant. If some stranger deleted my account, I don't think I
would be angry enough to attempt to press criminal perjury charges against
them.

~~~
fencepost
It may depend on the real-world relevance of the courses you've taken.

What happens if you're taking part in the Georgia Tech/Udacity online Master's
in Computer Science, and suddenly all of your course history on Udacity is
gone? Are you then stuck with remotely trying to access records through
whatever GA Tech has retained for MOOC students in a degree program? Does it
prevent you from signing up for additional courses because there's no record
of you completing the prerequisites? Does their platform have a provision for
overriding those prerequisites, and what would that have to be based on - word
from a professor who taught a MOOC, has never seen you or your work and
probably depends on Udacity's listings?

A similar situation could arise if the platform is being used for mandatory
continuing education credits in fields that have that. An industry that has CE
requirements would often be well-served to partner with an established and
stable online learning platform rather than building their own. If you're
required to take X hours of CE annually to retain a license but the only proof
you have is a PDF certificate from someplace that says "We've never heard of
this person," do you qualify or do you end up in licensing/certification hell?

------
wlll
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.

~~~
xster
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.

~~~
munk-a
Unfortunately it can also really seriously effect your credit rating, but then
again anything can do that and credit ratings are silly.

~~~
ianai
Can it? There shouldn’t be any obligation implicit for monthly subscriptions
outside of loans.

~~~
rootusrootus
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.

~~~
ianai
Why can’t I send them to some other service?

~~~
tedunangst
Send who, the debt collector? "Oh, no, I switched from Dropbox to backblaze.
Go get the money from them." I guess you can say that, but I doubt it works.

~~~
ianai
It’s not debt if you’ve just been automatically renewed. Agreeing to pay X in
Y payments is not the same as paying Z for 1 term of use.

~~~
ascar
Why do you think that? You entered a legally binding contract with an
obligation to pay. You refuse to pay without canceling the contract. Why
should the fact that it's a recurring payment change anything here?

~~~
ianai
Modern subscriptions are little more than saved payment information. Merely
having someone’s payment information does not give consent.

~~~
ascar
No, merely having payment information is not giving consent, but you signing
up for a subscription service was giving consent to a recurring subscription.
That's a totally different situation.

------
Tomte
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.

~~~
rolleiflex
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
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.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
I quit shopping at Amazon completely. Counterfeits are mixed in with legit. If
I want cheap shit, I hit eBay or Ali. And if I want legit I go to the store or
order from local box stores and pick up.

------
shortj
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
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
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
Is there a one-click docker image or other VM one can run as the
announcer/tracker for Syncthing?

------
graedus
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)

~~~
nightcracker
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.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
Possibly at the point where you actually bothered to print, sign, and mail a
physical letter (by registered mail so you can prove it).

At that point, there's no need to state it, go straight for the chargeback and
attach a copy of the cancellation letter and registered mail receipt.

------
mooman219
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.

------
heavymark
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.

------
ar_lan
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.

------
joshfraser
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
Constant Contact — same thing.

------
crysin
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.

------
glitcher
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
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.

------
runjake
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
I have long wished someone, ideally Apple, would successfully implement
micropayments for news.

~~~
science4sail
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)

------
makecheck
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
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.

------
gbrown
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...

------
numbers
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.

------
callinyouin
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
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.

------
ShakataGaNai
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.

------
jordanbeiber
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.

------
ohnope
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.

------
amingilani
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)

------
erikb
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. ;)

------
mmmeff
Eeeeeesh. Let's continue this tradition - companies need to be shamed for
pulling this crap.

Nice work, OP.

------
reconbot
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.

------
butterfi
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.

------
rgrove
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
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.

------
gesman
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
Seems like a great way for the vendor to send you debt to collections.

~~~
dpedu
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.

~~~
macintux
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.)

------
mrhappyunhappy
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.

------
devdimi
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.

------
sand500
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.

------
robotmachine
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.

------
FVIIIvWF
The process is quite convoluted, but at least they didn’t offer 50% discount
when you tried to cancel.

~~~
the_watcher
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.

------
bittermang
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
The three big banks that offer virtual credit card numbers are: Bank of
America, Capital One, and Citi.

------
post_break
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
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.

~~~
rrdharan
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.

------
tyfon
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.

------
sxates
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.

------
dbg31415
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.

------
j1vms
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.

------
dependsontheq
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
> 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
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.

------
_bxg1
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.

------
the_watcher
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.

------
simongr3dal
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.

------
pixelbath
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?"

------
abhisheksp
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

------
vthallam
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.

------
woolvalley
To add to the ancedata pile, cancelling spotify was refreshingly easy and
nice. A+ would resubscribe again, once they have homepod support.

------
gumby
Note: this is a video; should have [Video] in title.

------
webwew
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.

------
znpy
Just disable automatic payments from your paypal account and/or bank or card
issuer and they'll cancel it for you! EASY! /s

------
juddlyon
We should get a list going of companies doing it right. I recall quitting
Basecamp in like 3 clicks and and thank you page.

------
nothrows
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.

------
fartcannon
Similarly, trying to disable google services on your account is a gigantic
pain in the ass. Thank god for Lineage OS.

------
barking
As a counter example I recently cancelled a subscription to premiersports in
the UK, iirc it was a two click process.

------
daniel_iversen
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

------
herodotus
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.

------
jdtang13
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.

------
stefek99
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.

------
rayj
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.

------
cm2187
Does the cancellation involve loss of data? If so I think making it hard is
fair.

~~~
nickm12
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.

------
turdnagel
As bad as this is, I'm OK if I don't have to call or fill out a form.

------
anonymous5133
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
Others have pointed out that services are allowed to send you to collections.
You’re still a subscriber.

------
blairanderson
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 :)

------
rangibaby
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

------
fandango
It's nothing compared to G2A:

[https://www.pcgamesn.com/how-to-
cancel-g2a-shield](https://www.pcgamesn.com/how-to-cancel-g2a-shield)

------
x775
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.

------
rzzzt
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.

------
augbog
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?

------
cameldrv
It took four clicks.

~~~
strictnein
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.

------
Semaphor
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?

------
sigzero
Try moving a domain off Network Solutions. 3 days to send me a computer
generated code so I can transfer.

------
arendtio
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.

------
er0k
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.

------
grafporno
This is an ad for useloom.

~~~
arendtio
In fact, I found their service quite interesting, but for me, it doesn't work
without a Firefox version of their extension...

------
corbpie
dhouston
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863))
anything to say?

------
sandyhatches
Stamps.com requires a PHONE CALL to cancel. PHONE. in 2019.

------
xj9
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.

~~~
WilliamEdward
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
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.

------
sqldba
“Hard” is a stretch. Annoying maybe.

------
mdekkers
in other words "while you are leaving, let us make sure you will never come
back"

------
curyous
privacy.com breaks the back button in my browser. How do they do that?

------
scoot_718
1\. Cancel payments

------
grav
I was expecting a 500 server error.

------
Walkman
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
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
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
yes, you can get 130TB RAID6 of 15 disks for 269 a month. But in case you need
less...

------
wahjiwah
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.

------
PanoramaRegex
Very funny indeed. :)

