How do you get APILayer to stop billing you?

[robtaylor]

The support is terrible for their MarketStack API product - and several emails have had no joy.

I was about to leave a bad review on https://www.trustpilot.com/review/apilayer.com but seems many people are having similar issues.

Does anyone have any contacts there?

I just want to close the account and stop them billing me.

[mtmail]

That matched what I see on their public Twitter timeline. I'll be transparent that I'm competing with one of APILayer's APIs. Ever since APIlayer was acquired by Idera the support went downhill. The support team doesn't seem to be connected to their social media or engineer team. The specific API we're competing with (not MarketStack) was down 12 full days once, and twice a week down this year. No explanation given, promised post-mortem was never delivered, they still claim 99.9% uptime on their website. They ignore all Github issues including "Are you guys still in business?".

*) https://twitter.com/nathansfeed/status/1700845882051039550 , https://twitter.com/lionelkubwimana/status/16946363607772897... , https://twitter.com/nathansfeed/status/1698315294765199857

> Does anyone have any contacts there?

If you get no response maybe escalate to the parent company Idera (https://www.ideracorp.com/).

[tentacleuno]

Yikes, that Trustpilot is absolutely dreadful. According to one, they completely ignored him, while he was asking for the service to be cancelled for 3 months... then they say they don't offer refunds.

Over here, that would be something for the Ombudsman to investigate. Straight up malpractice.

The kicker is that they don't appear to even reply to the reviews.

[mtmail]

They're aware of the reviews, I mean they replied to some of them.

[tentacleuno]

They replied to some of them, but the majority of them seem to have been ignored. Furthermore, if they do reply, it more often than not seems to be combative / hostile to the reviewer. See exhibit A.

> Our data sources are extremely reliable and we haven't received any information about wrong data from customers who actually use the product.

The insinuation here is that the reviewer doesn't use the product.

[a13n]

What is the name/website of your company?

[mtmail]

https://opencagedata.com/ In 8 years only one credit card dispute but we believe that was a stolen credit card.

[Nextgrid]

You dispute the transactions and let the card network handle it. Too many such incidents and they'll lose their ability to process card payments altogether, so they'll be on top of it.

[taf2]

I did this to sprint in 2002 because they refused to let me cancel my contract as I was switching to AT&T. I spent 2 hours on a call being passed from one agent to the next. I decided to just call my bank and stop payments. In 2020 or 2019 right before the t-mobile merger I decided for work I wanted a back up mifi device so I walked into a sprint store. The manager eventually came out and told me they can’t do business with me because of a bad credit issue. So at least 15 years later and I was like damn oh yeah I remember I couldn’t cancel my service … so I got myself a t mobile mifi instead as backup. Still amazing to me - I even remember a big lawsuit over their cancellation policy…

[Nextgrid]

The only reason they can do that is that most people aren't aware of the rights the card networks give them, so most never bother and just submit to being scammed by the big company. Even on HN, it's disappointing to see how little is known. It's a literal "one weird trick companies don't want you to know" and it works wonders when a company doesn't want to hold up their side of a deal.

If everyone used chargebacks like they should, companies wouldn't be able to get away with this as they'd quickly run out of customers (and if they did, a competitor would quickly appear to take up all those banned customers).

[hermitdev]

Circa 2004, my last words to Sprint after 3 weeks of back and forth trying to get my phone working again: "Close my fucking account." I also switched to T-Mobile. Called them up immediately afterwards, spoke to a rep in the US (or at least spoke clear English with no cross-ocean lag) and had a phone overnighted to me the next day. Painless.

Background on it: I'd upgraded my phone w/ Sprint. And not long after receiving the new phone, it fell out of my pocket and landed in the toilet. Dead dead. No amount of rice was going to save it. This wasn't Sprints fault, never said it was to them. But, I still had my previous phone, so I call up, explain what happened and asked them to reactivate my old phone. And they did, great so far. The old phone worked fine for a month or so until it just didn't work anymore. I could still contact them using the phone via whatever their "*" number was, but I couldn't make any regular calls. I spent upwards of 40 hours over 3 weeks trying to get it resolved before I'd had enough.

The final call started with a recap of the issues and lack of progress and me stating that if the issue wasn't resolved tonight, I was closing my account. After another 2 hours on the phone, they gave up and told me "the only person that knows how to do this has gone home for the night". So I told call the rep to call them. They wouldn't. Lost customer. Switched to T-Mobile and haven't looked back. It's been nearly 20 years, still with T-Mobile. I've not had any issues like that, and every time I have had an issue, support has been great. I was dreading the Sprint acquisition, fearing support would tank. Thankfully, I think I've been wrong on that fear.

[stavros]

In general, I use privacy.com everywhere I can. I don't even bother unsubscribing, I just pause the card.

[CodesInChaos]

Does that work in the US? In Germany stopping to pay does not cancel your subscription, and the provider can apply the usual debt collection measures.

[stavros]

I wouldn't know, but they're welcome to send their debt collectors to Greece.

[mtmail]

They'd just contract a Greece debt collector. I'd would cost you extra fees.

[Seklfreak]

It does work in the U.S., legal agreement or not, I think debt collection is far less successful in the U.S. so most companies will just cancel the subscription for you.

On the other hand in the EU it's much easier to cancel subscriptions thanks to legal requirements on cancelation methods…

[kevincox]

> so most companies will just cancel the subscription for you.

This isn't "it working" really. It is just that for most companies it is not worth chasing down the debt that is rightfully owed to them.

[Seklfreak]

Fair point, but it works great for the consumer

[mtmail]

Speaking as a SaaS business owner that is real bad customer behavior. Is spending a couple of minute clicking "unsubscribe" too much work?

[bonton89]

> Is spending a couple of minute clicking "unsubscribe" too much work?

I can't speak to your business obviously but the couple minutes to unsubscribe is often actually finding a hidden support number (because they don't even have a way to unsubscribe otherwise) and getting stuck in some dead end phone tree game like the OP describes. Many companies make it easy to give them money but really hard to stop doing so.

This is one of the reasons I try to avoid recurrent billing products altogether. I actually don't think I'd purchase them without a middle layer like privacy.com to mitigate these potential situations.

[jabroni_salad]

Fallacies SaaS business owners have about unsubscribing from things:

* The unsubscribe buttons exists at all

* The unsubscribe button is available to every customer

* The unsubscribe buttons actually work

* When something goes wrong, the company's support is useful and helps the customer unsubscribe.

I'm sure you're one of the good ones, but i've been bitten too many times. Every subscription is believed to be on the same tier as gym memberships until proven otherwise. If I'm wrong, that's nice. If I'm right, I have all the levers.

[chrisandchris]

I understand you (as a business owner myself), but asking that in a post about a company that won't let users cancel their plans... feels poetic?

[capableweb]

Wouldn't it be the same if the card was rejected for any other reason, including that the card is no longer active, don't have enough funds or anything else? What makes this particular behavior "real bad customer behavior", compared to the other reasons a payment could be rejected?

[mtmail]

A lot of services don't stop the day payment wasn't received but try for weeks to follow up, be automated or manual. In our (small scale) B2B SaaS we give benefit of doubt and the last thing we want is to stop access, which might break some production system on the customer side. I'm more concerned about the "I don't even bother". Some companies might hide their unsubscribe feature, that's frustrating, a lot others make it super easy.

[capableweb]

Ok, so what's the issue exactly? The person is no longer using the service, so won't matter if you retry one time one day then cancel VS retrying for weeks, their usage wouldn't impact you, and eventually the account will be deactivated/suspended?

[kevincox]

Maybe payment processors will charge significant fees for declined transactions and it may hurt your reputation with them, possibly resulting in overall fee increases or outright being kicked off of the platform.

[karaterobot]

Given that there are no laws against using credit cards this way, is bad customer behavior just defined as customers not doing what you want them to do? I would suggest that you should account for real customer behavior rather than just characterizing it as malicious, which does not seem like any kind of solution.

[duped]

Make it easier to unsubscribe instead of complaining.

[ceejayoz]

Is gracefully handling a payment decline too much work?

People do this because of "real bad SaaS behavior" in the past.

[RamblingCTO]

> Is gracefully handling a payment decline too much work?

It's not only that. If enough people do it and you pass a threshold you might get kicked out of stripe etc. So is it too much to ask to differentiate between good and bad businesses?

[ceejayoz]

> If enough people do it and you pass a threshold you might get kicked out of stripe etc.

Stripe should be entirely capable of differentiating between first-time declines (which might be someone testing cards) and a previously good card used for recurring charges that's out of funds or no longer active.

If your declines are well outside the industry norm because of the scenario we're talking about, I'd consider it a sign your unsubscribe process is too onerous or broken.

> So is it too much to ask to differentiate between good and bad businesses?

How am I going to know in advance if you're gonna put me through the ringer to cancel?

It's a safety measure.

[RamblingCTO]

I understand your view and I'm very sorry what this world has come to in this regard. Doing business together is something I really value. So I can't blame you.

[vizzah]

thankfully, my credit card just expired when I no longer needed the service.

Try <[e-mail]> who was then chasing me to resume paying.

[millzlane]

Send a copy to the to whatever government agency handles fraud or consumer abuse, and copy your banks fraud dept. I guarantee someone emails you back within a few hours.

[bonton89]

Some credit card companies seem to offer a "service" where they send updated information to recurring charging merchants when you get a new card. I haven't encountered this as an issue myself but I was reading about it as something to watch out for the other day.

[exabrial]

Chargeback for certain, and always keep a paper trail!

[zeruh]

Funny thing, they just sent us a legal notice for not paying them $70, LOL

[upon_drumhead]

Privacy.com card and then close the virtual card is how I do it when companies make it a pain to cancel.