I mentioned in my weekly goals post on Monday that I had found a new system for managing my tasks and calendar. I also canceled my Todoist Pro subscription on Monday after making sure all my tasks were switched over, so imagine my surprise when I was charged for another month tonight.
Making it difficult or impossible to cancel a subscription is a lowdown, dirty scam. No honest company operates this way.
Avoid Todoist at all costs. There are much better task management apps out there anyway.
I'm working on a more detailed review of my new system, which I will post soon. But in the meantime, consider yourself warned about Todoist.
UPDATE: Todoist responded quickly, I'll give them credit for that. I've already been refunded for the charge, and they "canceled" my subscription (again?). But I shouldn't have had to go through this. And what if I hadn't noticed? If I didn't have a tight budget, or if I paid via credit card, I might not have. How many months would they have gotten more money from me before I realized?
Years ago, there was a scammy freelance writing job board that charged a subscription fee. They had a low cost trial subscription for you to decide whether you wanted to commit to the full-cost subscription. It wasn't very good and most people tried to cancel once they found that out... except typically they weren't able to. The company made it very hard to contact them, and even when you did, it was very difficult to get them to follow through with canceling your subscription. Some people would even have to change their bank account information in order to get the charges to stop. The scammers made tons of money just off of people who were trying to cancel their subscriptions.
About a decade ago, I had a similar experience trying to cancel MoviePass. It started out as a valid service that I used for several years, but toward the end of their run, they were having issues with their contracts and stopped having any good movies. When I canceled their service, they kept charging me. I wasn't able to get them to stop by contacting them directly, so ultimately I had to call my bank to block future payments and refund what I'd been charged. But again, how much money did they make just by making it difficult to cancel?
I kinda hate this world we're in now where absolutely everything charges a subscription, but I hate even more that it's making it easy for companies to make money off of us by being negligent and not canceling subscriptions when they're supposed to.
Keep an eye on your finances after canceling a subscription, friends. Make sure this doesn't happen to you, and act quickly if it does.
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