Paid for a month of lingq, i've written about it previously. Tldr the concept is alright but lingq itself is incredibly janky and markets itself in a very snake oily manner.
Anyway i want to delete my account but i can't find the delete account button that is apparently on the account page. I figure i'll downgrade first.
First page: are you sure? so i click yes i'm sure, downgrade membership. Does it downgrade me now?
Second page: get 50% of membership for the next three months. Click no, downgrade, surely it will let me now.
Third page: unlimited lingq for life for only 199$. What? Downgrade button.
Fourth page: Lingq vacation plan, two dollars per month. So this is actually something i hadn't realised until this point, if you don't pay your subscription fee, they don't actually keep your account in a dormant state like most other such services do (as far as i've been led to understand). You lose everything. You have to keep paying just to store data on their servers. I guess this isn't actually unreasonable, except it is because my data is pretty much *checks known words list i downloaded earlier* less than ten kilobytes. And either the business is doing something really wrong, or they are making absolutely enough profit on fifteen dollar per month memberships to put aside a terabyte drive for dormant accounts. Of course this is an oversimplification, and there's more data around than just my known word list. But i think for the price, they can account for some data storage without a subscription.
Anyways. Click continue downgrading.
Fifth page. My account has been downgraded. Great! Now there's a dialogue box asking me for feedback why. No skip or close button? Looks like i have to fill it out. But at least that's the end of that journey.
It feels like they almost know their product is mediocre and are doing anything they can to squeeze money out of me. The sequence has a few other red flags for me.
First, i don't like off by one pricing. I feel like it doesn't respect the customer at all. Just say it's two hundred.
Second, why are you trying to give me discounts when i say i don't want the service? Why would i give you two hundred dollars when i don't want to give you anything?
Third, i really don't like services that reward disloyal customers. I don't like the concept of a disloyal customer, but i think that's the best way to describe it. But you should be rewarding customers who like and use and pay for your product with the better value to make them feel it's worth it, i think, in my vague view of marketing. I don't think i've ever seen fifty percent off anywhere else on the site, and not a buy for life offer. These are exclusively given to people who don't want to use the service anymore. Hmm
Fourth, any lifetime access promises without either (a) an asterisk saying lifetime of the company, not the customer, or (b) actually letting me run the software or get the mp3s or whatever on my own device off a third party server, mean nothing to me.
...but after all that, i still can't find the delete account button :/