Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel

Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by usiegj00 on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @12:54AM (#25514825)

Hi guys--Jonathan here at Bare. I've forced everyone's hand on this because... whelp... we've recently acquired the business and we ended up finding that we can be critical to Stripe Webhooks processing for folks on the older Stripe API. We literally will take down your invoicing on Stripe when a customer cancels. Then we have the unsavory task of working with customers that have canceled, did not complete their deprovisioning and then flame us for causing them outages. I love a lively debate but if you're a customer and love us, reach out to me NOW and I'll hear your feedback. If you're not a customer, then please, please if you never want to talk to your vendor, please go to ProfitWell or ChartMogul. Patrick and Nick are great guys and are crushing it and will gladly take your business. We are getting eaten from the bottom by platforms AHEM Stripe that are inspired by us, folks that clone us and you can see from our revenue transparency that we're the last in line for making money. That is going to change--by helping customers that really want to make more... make more. If you'd like to give me direct feedback, give me a ring at 855 252 6050. (I'm also a CISSP™, CREST CRT™ and Brown Cybersecurity dude--so if you've any legislation that speaks to this, let me know--for you folks quoting CA--we have business customers and they are over 13.)

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by teraflop on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:07AM (#25514888)

In addition to the California law that has already been mentioned, would you care to comment on the Visa Product and Service Rules (which Stripe's TOS incorporates by reference) which state that if you process recurring payments, you must:

> Provide a simple cancellation procedure, and, if the Cardholder’s order was initially accepted online, at least an online cancellation procedure.

https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/about-visa/visa-rules...

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by colechristensen on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:03AM (#25514867)

In California it is illegal to not allow online cancellation for services signed up for online. No exceptions, it has nothing to do with children.

If I were your customer I would make a point of taking every legal avenue to punish you for this behavior, and the reasoning here guarantees I wouldn’t think of touching your product.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by tgtweak on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:09AM (#25514900)

If I can delete my entire GitHub account and screw everything and everyone connected to it with a single red warning prompt you can bet your ass it's possible to online cancel a service that may in some edge cases affect a customer.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by cesher on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:11AM (#25514917)

If you automated the on-boarding process to Baremetrics, you sure as hell can automate the un-boarding process.

Regardless, I don’t get why anyone uses Baremetrics, your dashboard is slow as shit and looks like your customer service is equally shit.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by rahimiali on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @12:59AM (#25514848)

People are complaining that they don’t want to call you. And here you are asking people to call you.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by usiegj00 on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:07AM (#25514886)

Hiya--we're not a consumer service, so yeah, I'm asking people to call me. I'll respond a bit to this thread because HN is read by lots of folks, but it's also filled with trolls. Businesses talk to businesses. Especially when we're going to screw something up with low bandwidth communication. I'm a real dude and happy to chat to real folks running real businesses. Consumers should not be using our platform.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by austhrow743 on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @03:02AM (#25515515)

>Hiya--we're not a consumer service, so yeah, I'm asking people to call me.

Hey man, just wanted to let you know that you've accidentally placed free trial and mailing list buttons on your home page. Seeing as you're not a consumer service and all you probably want to take those down.

You've also accidentally integrated with the consumer service known as Stripe, who have the horribly consumerish feature of closing your account right in account settings. Might want to get on that before the Coalition of Serious Business finds out.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by rahimiali on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:22AM (#25514988)

I’m not hung up on consumer vs business or legality. I’m trying to point out that you sticking to your guns in this situation sends the message that you don’t care about inconveniencing the people you’re doing business with. I understand these are soon-to-be-ex-customers who are about to have no value to you. But you have a chance here to leave them on good terms so they can recommend you to their friends. You are instead leaving a bad taste in their mouths.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by jevgeni on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:26AM (#25515010)

Since you are targeting global customers, just FYI in a lot of European jurisdictions a written “expression of will” is enough. So nobody is buying this obligation to call ruse.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by noncoml on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:08AM (#25514894)

> HN is read by lots of folks, but it's also filled with trolls

Just wow..

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by ZephyrBlu on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @07:08AM (#25516718)

Pretty funny that he says that about one of the most mature and well-behaved communities on the internet.

I guess everyone who disagrees with him is a troll.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by GoblinSlayer on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @06:00AM (#25516410)

Uh, no, sending meat sounds over air is the worst form of communication ever, packed with ambient noise, other noise, aggressive compression, low volume, intermittent radio signal and heuristic commutation that works only every other time.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by AntiImperialis2 on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @06:10AM (#25516469)

So, you're discriminating against deaf people? Boy, you're going down big. You have no idea.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by chris_wot on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:11AM (#25514916)

I may have had my differences with the HN mods, but this place is NOT filled with trolls. If anything, it is quite troll free.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by lodovic on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @02:30AM (#25515360)

I think Brian will be burned out in a week once unhappy customers start to call him

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by sergiomattei on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @08:31AM (#25517436)

This just smells of completely misunderstanding who you're targeting.

Good luck, you're going to need it.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by that_guy_iain on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @12:31PM (#25519910)

I'm just going to put this out there, maybe he knows who he is targetting and it's not us.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by papandada on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @02:06AM (#25515223)

I've never seen a business talk to a business, actually.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by rchaud on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @09:56AM (#25518173)

Lawyers talk to each other so businesses don't have to. Which is where this might end up if Baremetrics has customers in California.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by that_guy_iain on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @12:34PM (#25519941)

Only a fool would go get a lawyer instead of making a phone call. Especially, if you have employees who you can tell to make the phone call too. I suspect if you did get a lawyer the first thing they'll suggest is they call the number to get it cancelled and will ask if you called the number.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by rchaud on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:07PM (#25520282)

I'm not talking about a customer getting a lawyer involved. I'm talking about a DA looking into whether Baremetrics is violating CA law by not having an online-only cancellation option to corresponding with its online-only registration system.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by icelancer on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @03:07AM (#25515542)

Can only imagine how angry the original Baremetrics founder is watching you ruin his business' reputation in mere weeks.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by tgtweak on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @11:37AM (#25519359)

> days

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by jakelazaroff on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:00AM (#25514855)

> we ended up finding that we can be critical to Stripe Webhooks processing for folks on the older Stripe API. We literally will take down your invoicing on Stripe when a customer cancels.

What does this even mean? Are you saying that if you remove a customer’s Stripe integration, it prevents them from being paid by their own customers?

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by khalilovcmd on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:05AM (#25514879)

I think he means if we are using their "Recover" product which I explained in my email that we absolutely don't use it.

https://baremetrics.com/features/recover

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by DCoder on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:37AM (#25515061)

I think what they mean is this: if you're dissatisfied with invoice PDFs generated and sent by Stripe, it's fairly common to disable the sending and use an integration [0] to generate/send them out instead. And then if you cancel that integration, oops, your customers no longer get their invoices.

[0]: https://stripe.com/partners/apps-and-extensions/invoicing

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by khalilovcmd on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @03:50AM (#25515739)

Hmm, interesting. They must know that I (we) are not using this, because I didn't even know this feature exists and our customers are happy getting sent Stripe invoices.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by supermatt on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @03:46AM (#25515715)

For the sake of your business you need a buffer between you and the world.

> you can see from our revenue transparency that we're the last in line for making money

Maybe there are some social reasons for that. You've definitely lost face here.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by scoutt on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @05:41AM (#25516309)

If you offer a very convenient frictionless entry, you have to offer a frictionless exit.

Otherwise it's way too difficult to interpret it as anything else but a cheap and very sad way to keep a customer. A really sad business practice.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by khalilovcmd on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @08:12AM (#25517253)

100% in agreement, that's how I felt too.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by chris_wot on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:10AM (#25514905)

Curious what you would do for someone who is mute. Would you make them call you?

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by skellystudios on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @10:50AM (#25518808)

Or far more common: someone who doesn't speak English

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by justinclift on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @02:14AM (#25515271)

... or any other medical condition which affects voice or hearing. Deafness, Laryngitis, etc.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by trungdq88 on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:35AM (#25515053)

Lol, I want this question answered.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by reaperducer on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @01:47AM (#25515115)

Mutes already know how to use a TTY relay service.

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by chris_wot on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @02:04AM (#25515210)

Why force them to use it when email might be better?

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by cannabis_sam on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @05:35AM (#25516275)

Why are you guys obsessed with phonecalls?

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Re:Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel by dave1999x on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @05:04PM (#25522797)

No one believes you. Everyone sees this for what it is; a barrier to exit

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