Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by protonmail 1092 days ago
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.
1 comments
jacooper 1092 days ago
Why not remind the users to delete their E-Mails near the end of their subscriptions?
link
protonmail 1092 days ago
We could, there is no guarantee that they would do it, which is the problem.
link
shinryuu 1091 days ago
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.

link
omniglottal 1091 days ago
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.
link
protonmail 1091 days ago
Thank you for that feedback, it will be passed on internally.
link