We had a few cases of people not wanting their membership to auto-renew recently, but not doing anything to stop it, despite receiving three warning emails. Once the money are taken from your account, the middlemen will take their cut and not give it back. Any refund will thus be less than the money that left your account. (We have refunded all that asked politely).
In this connection I want to say something clearly: No one else would refund you. We don’t take the money manually, the system does automatically. Obviously, we want you to stay. But if you want to leave us (sad) or take a break, you have to deactivate the auto-renewal.
We had two cases so far where people ignored the warnings, auto-renewed and were abusive about it. (And some where they were not, where we refunded all but the charges). This is not OK. Not fair. And just silly. One of them was 4 months after auto-renewing, the membership had been used a little bit and there was a “I know where you live” vibe about the whole thing, which was clearly meant to be intimidating, but resulted in no refund as the only one (the F-word was used yesterday and we still refunded the guy). But threatening us? I took a stand on that one…
So here is the guideline:
A) Turn off auto-renewal if you are in doubt you want to renew. You can always renew when your membership expires.
B) Read the warning emails (and all other emails from us)
C) If you auto-renewed anyway, but are unhappy about it, tell us quickly and you will get a 86% approx. refund. After two weeks we feel no obligation to refund you, but ask anyway and we may sort something out.
D) Be kind to us. We would never be anything else to you. We are people too and we want you to have a good experience here, also if leaving.
Often a camp expires about two years after your membership and you get auto-emails warning you. Don’t confuse this with your membership.
We are in the 4th year of the academy running, in 2400+ hours of lessons, 400+ people have taken the yearly membership, and 100+ the monthly.
Thinking about it, 2 people only being abusive in the 500, is a percentage I’ll take any day. Because that appalling behavior is the exception.
The reality is, that all of you are lovely! And I love working with you because we all together make this academy our happy place! I love the academy and it’s the best part of my day when I receive an email with news from a tournament, a game, and how a specific lesson helped you to find the solution over the board. It’s wonderful when you send emails with updates on your personal life as well! It really makes it all worth it and I feel that we are doing a good thing!
And I want to thank each and every one of you for supporting this project! I want to thank you for all your kind words, and feedback. I want to thank you for inspiring us to be better and to improve. And I would like to ask you to keep the emails and the suggestions and the forum replies coming!
And if you are not sure you want to renew, as Jacob said, cancel the auto-renewal from your profile and you can always come back
Many of you had taken a break and come back stronger and more determined than ever.
How exactly do we turn off auto-renewal? I went to my subscriptions page and there was a Cancel button, but I’m afraid that it might immediately terminate my subscription, rather than just not renew it. Thanks!
Dear Dan (and anyone else who is reading this) press cancel. If your fear comes true (it will not) then you send me a private message “Kallia, please reinstate my membership” and I will do so
Or, you send me a message, “Kallia please check that my auto-renewal is off”
Or, you send me a message well in advance your auto-renewal comes through and I cancel it for you!
Generally, communication is the key here
Update regarding the automated emails:
apart from the 1-3 emails that you already should be receiving, our lovely developers added a new extension to the shop and you will now be receiving an extra email, 3 days before there is a change in your membership status, either cancellation or auto-renewal.
Totally unacceptable - you cant just abuse people because you forgot to cancel. It’s actually worse than the middlemen taking a cut - if you have to process too many refunds then the merchant acquirers might raise their rates for you because the business looks ‘more risky’ - they hate chargebacks.
I understand forgetting to cancel. I really do.
But as you correctly pointed out, we have to cover processing fees for every transaction, and currency conversion fees and cancellation fees. We really, really, don’t want to give money to middlemen unless we have to. Because as you said, then we will get charged even more ridiculous fees if too many cancellations happen.
@Annual_Members
If you have at any point manually unsubscribed from our mail list or while registering you opted out of all emails, you will not be receiving emails warning you about the auto-renewal or that your membership is about to expire.
