[firefoxkekw]

Proton, the company that still in 2023 doesn't allow to cancel the auto renewal without losing access to the services you have already paid, the most anti-consumer thing I have seen in my life.

Here is how it works: 1. You pay for example for 2 years of access. 2. After a few months you decide to remove the auto renew and just use the remaining time of your subscription, your only option is to cancel your current subscription and lost access to any premium service you paid for, they give you credits for the remaining time of your subscription, that you can use if you contract other services.

So you are force to cancel the subscription before the renewal time and hope you don't forget to cancel it.

Run from this company.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

Its unfortunate.

I was a happily paying customer for years

One day, i decided to try out the business plan for my naescent startup for organic farming.

When i realized they were missing critical features (autofwd rules one i recall) i tried to go back to the regular paid account.

Not only i couldnt do it, but they forced me to delete emails by hand for years worth of pictures that i had saved in the account to get below the free plan quota. All because i needed to reestablish my personal account so i could move both custom domains to another provider.

then i got below the quota, it would still not allow me to reestablish the account.

To their credit, although their customer service take a while, they did help.

It makes me sad, and have a very bad taste in my mouth because I was really trying to give business to a google competitor.

EDIT: just like OP, I lost access to the existing paid plan when I upgraded. What really made me upset is that I couldnt restore access to my account by downgrading on my own, no matter what I tried. Took custom domains off account, still cannot downgrade...gave up freebie storage space , still cannot downgrade. Meet criteria to buy monthly plan. Cannot downgrade. Reduced feature use to meet free plan tier, still could not downgrade. Reduced storage used below free plan, could not go to free plan, either. All the while I lost access to all my accounts because I couldnt do 2FA challenge sent to my old proton free plan.

Needless to say, proton free plan is not tied to any mission critical access anymore.

[ErikGulliksen]

This is exactly the reason I only use paypal or virtual cards from Revolut when I sign up to stuff online now. I can cancel the subscription from Paypal settings, or delete the virtual card in Revolut, and that ends up cancelling the service at expiry after they fail once or twice to take payment.

At least here in the UK this works fine. Netflix, Spotify etc all deal with that properly when I've "cancelled" my service this way.

[ravenstine]

I do the same thing using Privacy.com. Enough companies today use the "fuck you" approach towards their users, hence the users should use the "fuck you" approach right back at them.

What's funny is how people won't use virtual cards because they think bill collectors or the law will come after them. That's extremely unlikely to happen for an unpaid $9.99 bill, especially since it's not like bill collectors work on behalf of companies free of charge. It's in the best interest of companies to ignore the transgression, freeze the account, and wait for the user to come back and reactivate it; much less likely to happen if they actively punish a user because they missed a payment.

Same goes for the "but muh credit score" argument. Somehow my credit score is still excellent despite the numerous times I cancelled virtual cards or didn't feel like paying my utility bills.

So yeah, use virtual cards everywhere.

[rand_flip_bit]

Privacy.com allows you to use completely made up billing information - transactions won't get rejected if the name/address is a mismatch. You can just feed a fake name and address into each site, even if they wanted to, how would they identify you? Of course, this likely works best if you use an email aliasing service that hides your real email completely, and a VPN to obscure your physical IP address.

[tourmalinetaco]

I can’t use Privacy.com because they use cellphone numbers. Supposedly, someone had used my number previously to sign up and now I cannot make an account since that number is “tied to an account”. It’s why I hate this standard of 2FA/“identity verification” with something as antiquated as phone numbers. I’d love to use their service, but as of right now I’m simply not allowed.

[mdaniel]

An admirable tactic, but a lot of services can spot those virtual cards because they "identify" as if they are pre-paid (and maybe they are in the backend, I dunno). Same trick as using Google Voice number for SMS/phone: it identifies as VoIP and more than a few sites give me the "hey, what are you trying to pull giving us a number we can't spam endlessly?!"

[evandale]

When I see those tactics I imagine the company throwing a full screen seizure inducing modal window with a red background and lime text of all their 1 star reviews and search for a new product.

[mdaniel]

I long for a day when customers get to exclusively vote with their wallet/eyeballs and we're not held hostage by the network effect and/or similar gatekeeping tactics

[baal80spam]

Virtual cards are the way to go. My bank offers free virtual cards for my accounts and they work flawlessly.

[protonmail]

The cancellation varies depending on the service. For Proton VPN for example, the cancellation now does not force downgrade you right away. But for Proton Mail, we have kept the legacy method of immediate downgrade because that service involves data storage. Because VPN has no data storage, so we can auto downgrade you at the end of the subscription to the free plan. This doesn’t work for Proton Mail because auto downgrade to free might require randomly deleting emails to fit under the free storage quota. So for that reason we ask users to actually downgrade at the time they decide to downgrade to resolve storage quota issues themselves since we cannot automatically do that later on their behalf.

[jacooper]

Why not remind the users to delete their E-Mails near the end of their subscriptions?

[protonmail]

We could, there is no guarantee that they would do it, which is the problem.

[shinryuu]

The way I would like to see this as a customer would be.

I'm able to cancel the auto-renew. Once I do that with email I will get a warning that says: "We will attempt to cancel renewal the last date of your subscription. If your account exceeds the free quota, your account WILL renew."

As the date for the renewal comes closer and the user exceeds the free quota, as a user I will repeatedly get mail that the account will renew unless it meets said free quota.

[omniglottal]

Some customers would throw a fit if they paid a renewal fee after scheduling cancellation - for good, legal reasons. Some customers would throw a fit if a cancellation scheduled >1 year ago resulted in random emails getting deleted (imagine the last photo taken of a lost family member being in those emails). Between both options, neither is appealing. It seems as though the current option is best, but I do like your suggestion too: the best of both options, with the risk of something lost (subscription money) being replaceable/refundable in the event of an honest error.

[protonmail]

Thank you for that feedback, it will be passed on internally.

[barbazoo]

Thank you for pointing this out! Not a good look the fact that they feel they have to make it that difficult to switch to a different provider. Even Amazon Prime doesn't do that.

[ravenstine]

> doesn't allow to cancel the auto renewal without losing access to the services you have already paid, the most anti-consumer thing I have seen in my life.

Uh... really? That's the most anti-consumer thing you've ever seen? It may be anti-consumer, but that's nowhere near one of the worst. At least it's actually feasible and straight-forward to cancel with Proton, unlike certain big-name Silicon Valley firms; at least they aren't known for outright stealing your money, canceling your accounts at a whim, or refusing support. I don't like it, but they explicitly warn the user what's going to happen if they downgrade, and there's of course the refund you mentioned.

Having been a happy customer of Proton for many years, I wouldn't say "run" on that basis. It may be a deal breaker to some, but I've been happy enough with what I get that I find it a tradeoff worth tolerating.

[tailspin2019]

As a Protonmail customer, and since they're active in this thread, I think this would be an excellent place for them to reply to your concern here to say that they agree that it's not customer friendly and that they'll fix it.

:)

[protonmail]

The cancellation varies depending on the service. For Proton VPN for example, the cancellation now does not force downgrade you right away. But for Proton Mail, we have kept the legacy method of immediate downgrade because that service involves data storage. Because VPN has no data storage, so we can auto downgrade you at the end of the subscription to the free plan. This doesn’t work for Proton Mail because auto downgrade to free might require randomly deleting emails to fit under the free storage quota. So for that reason we ask users to actually downgrade at the time they decide to downgrade to resolve storage quota issues themselves since we cannot automatically do that later on their behalf.

[protonmail]

It might have gotten lost, but we replied here with some context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36512900

[devmunchies]

> your only option

A calendar reminder to cancel the week before renewal is another option

[pdpi]

It’s not “another option”. It’s a tool for dealing with the only option they give you.

[barbazoo]

And also happen to have the time to switch email providers that same week. No, what they do is just shitty.

[devmunchies]

I never said what they are doing isn't "shitty".

[Mystery-Machine]

Thank you, I believe that was obvious to everyone.

[laeri]

Yes this is an option but a very annoying one.

[Mystery-Machine]

Yeah, I have the exact same issue with them.