It took Jonathan Ginsberg hours of work over two years to cancel his subscription to Dropbox.
After he was charged $119.88 last year to renew the online file storage subscription that he had lost interest in, Ginsberg said that he hit dead ends trying to quit on Dropbox’s website. No one seemed to answer the customer service number.
It took Jonathan Ginsberg hours of work over two years to cancel his subscription to Dropbox.
After he was charged $119.88 last year to renew the online file storage subscription that he had lost interest in, Ginsberg said that he hit dead ends trying to quit on Dropbox’s website. No one seemed to answer the customer service number.
He eventually disputed the charge with his credit card company and followed Dropbox’s instructions to mail printed cancellation documents to a P.O. Box.
Then a few months ago, Dropbox emailed Ginsberg about a failed payment for a subscription that he thought had been canceled. He fought again and wasn’t charged.
“I did kind of beat them but it took a hell of a lot of effort,” said the 58-year-old St. Petersburg, Florida, resident.
Ginsberg isn’t the only one wrestling over a Dropbox subscription. The Bay Area’s Better Business Bureau has been investigating the San Francisco company for what BBB has said is a pattern of unresolved customer complaints, partly about difficulties quitting paid Dropbox accounts.
A Dropbox spokeswoman apologized for Ginsberg’s experience and said that the BBB complaints were not representative of Dropbox’s customer interactions or its simple cancellations.
Experiences like Ginsberg’s show that fighting over unwanted subscriptions is a maddening fact of life. The frustrations persist despite decades of federal and state consumer protection efforts that focused on subscriptions.
Why do subscriptions sometimes feel so impossible to quit, and what can you do to protect yourself?
When companies have millions of customers — Dropbox discloses about 18 million paying business and personal users and more than 700 million registered users — some of them will be unhappy.
The BBB says that investigations like the one into Dropbox customer complaints happen all the time.
“Contacting them is impossible,” one person wrote in January. Another said in 2023 that Dropbox seems to hold people prisoner.
Ginsberg couldn’t believe that he used the 250-year-old U.S. Postal Service to reach a Silicon Valley company. Samuel Levine, a former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection bureau, wasn’t impressed, either.
“A company that specializes in providing people with high-tech tools should not be forcing people to use 18th-century technology to cancel their subscriptions,” Levine said.
“Mr. Ginsberg’s experience didn’t live up to our high standards and we’re sorry,” the Dropbox spokeswoman said.
The company is “in active discussions” with the BBB about its review, she said, and added that many BBB complaints were duplicates of those that Dropbox customer service had already resolved.
The spokeswoman said canceling Dropbox takes a few clicks online or people can cancel by mail if they can’t do so online. “We care deeply about our customers’ experience with our services, and that includes those who may want to cancel their subscription,” she said.
Trapping people in subscriptions is illegal, but there are pervasive complaints about businesses doing so. The FTC has reported receiving many thousands of yearly complaints from people who said they felt tricked into signing up for subscriptions or jumped through hoops to quit.
When Levine was at the FTC, the agency passed a “click-to-cancel” rule that mandated businesses make it as easy for people to quit recurring subscriptions as it was to sign up. Business groups sued and a federal court blocked the rule this summer.
The FTC has said that it can and does enforce violations of existing subscription laws. Levine said those actions have helped but not enough.
Levine said that canceling subscriptions is often intentionally maddening and people shouldn’t blame themselves if they hit roadblocks.
“Companies should be ashamed of these practices and policymakers should be using every tool they have to put a stop to them,” he said.
If you have trouble canceling a subscription or feel you were unfairly charged for one, try to resolve the disagreement with the company first. You can dispute the charge with your credit card provider. Also:
• File a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. You must provide proof of your dealings with the company. BBB can be a middleman in resolving disputes with businesses, though this process can take time.
Filing a BBB complaint can be useful beyond your situation. Experts say that regulators including the FTC look at BBB complaints to help spot patterns of potential legal violations.
• Look for signs of unresponsive businesses before you sign up. A BBB spokeswoman, Melanie McGovern, advised reading complaints with an eye to how businesses resolve them (or don’t).
• Cancel before you forget. You sometimes know that you want a subscription for just a week, month or year. You can often cancel the subscription as you sign up, and use the subscription until it expires.
• Complain to the FTC or your state attorney general. The FTC’s online complaint form doesn’t have a subscription-specific category. Choose “something else” if that’s the best fit.
Search online for your state and “attorney general file complaint.” New York and California residents have particularly strong protections against deceptive subscriptions.
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