Tell HN: Educative.io auto-renews without warning, refuses to provide refunds

92 points by blowski 1 year ago | 31 comments

For reasons that now elude me, I signed up for educative.io last year. It's not great content, little more than a few crappy ebooks in a web UI. I'm pretty sure I turned off auto-renew at the time (because I normally do this for annual subscriptions), but have no written record.

It recently auto-renewed for an annual term (£189), and customer service are refusing to refund. I will, of course, be getting a chargeback from my credit card company.

So if you also foolishly subscribed to an educative.io that is now dormant, make sure you're deleted the account and have written evidence.

sidcool 1 year ago |

All the EdTech companies (e.g. India's Byju, once valued at $22 billion, bankrupt now, LambdaSchool, AlgoExpert etc.) start with lofty and noble goals, but reduce themselves to profit greedy companies. Don't get me wrong, nothing against profit seeking, but profit greed at any cost makes them indulge in dark patterns and even illegal strategies.

Benjamin_Dobell 1 year ago | |

By no means condoning this behavior, just wanted to comment that you're largely correct in that EdTech companies tend to start out with altruistic intentions and and shift away from that over time. However, I wouldn't say that it's always greed — I'm sure it is in some cases! However, in general it's a really tough industry to even break even in. If you don't generate income, you're shutting down, in which case you ain't helping anyone any more. EdTech companies tend to start out with an unsustainable premise. Honestly, it's not too dissimilar to the typical start up playbook whereby you want to build a brand and attain a certain level of market penetration before focusing too heavily on revenue. The issue is it's not necessarily a high retention industry, so when it comes time to generate revenue there tends to be drastic changes to the core offering and the company's mission is diluted :(

I say this as a 2x Head of Engineering in this industry who would very much like to work in this space again.

upon_drumhead 1 year ago |

This is why I use privacy.com cards for the majority of my online purchases. You never know when a company will change a policy and charge cards on file.

itsdrewmiller 1 year ago | |

If you have a capital one card they provide virtual cards for free, though the UI is a pain. If you are signing up for things as a business mercury.com provides virtual cards for free (and with a really nice UI and feature set).

ThatMedicIsASpy 1 year ago | |

Now the question is do I get forbidden because I am from Germany or do I get forbidden because I use Mullvad VPN trying to access privacy.com

juice_bus 1 year ago | | |

I'm getting it as well in Canada, without any VPN.

miki123211 1 year ago | |

Revolut also offers a similar service, for the non Americans among us.

_lvbh 1 year ago | | |

I use Revolut. It generally works well but I distrust them after they arbitrarily froze my account for ~3 days and never explained why. I didn’t have any cash on me at the time and had to actually starve

Wistar 1 year ago | |

Wow. I never knew about privacy.com cards. I may have to avail myself of that service. Thanks.

nalgeon 1 year ago |

Educative also has a very strange (to say the least) way of interacting with authors: https://antonz.org/educative

siva7 1 year ago |

There should be no problem on the customer side. Just do a chargeback in this case (and please do this only in case of a scammer as the consequences are severe for a business. Always reach out first to the company before doing this!). If enough people do a chargeback the payment provider of the company will kick them out of business in case you can prove in the dispute from the payment provider that the auto-renews go against regulations in your respective country.

liminalsunset 1 year ago |

Seems like the popular (?) "Grokking the Coding Interview" course is sold through them. This was commonly recommended on sites like Blind.

The content of the course appears to be widely distributed for free elsewhere on the internet now on GitHub (unofficially). At least the last time I checked, there also exists cross references to LeetCode questions equivalent to their questions.

neilv 1 year ago |

I accidentally helped sustain Yahoo, by spending years paying my credit card statement every month without looking at the line items.

kkfx 1 year ago |

I do not know how things works in banking outside EU but here for on-line stuff it's fairly common to pay with virtual bank cards, meaning a one-shot or few shots (at your option) with a maximum amount Visa or Mastercard dummy card.

I do normally not use a real card for anything on-line so any eventual auto-renew end up in fail anyway.

blowski 1 year ago | |

> outside EU

Way to kick a Brit when they're down!

Fortunately, we implemented the EU regulations back in 2013, and haven't yet repealed them so I can chargeback on a normal credit card.

kkfx 1 year ago | | |

No specific intent, sorry, though virtual cards are more effective since they can pick any money directly, no action needed on their former customer part.

I state that because MANY do not see little expenses or even if they see they decide that digging and acting for little money it's not worth, as a result many parasitic companies still exists "sold in bundle" of something else, where they give some breadcrumbs to the one who sell them together and few money per many customers makes them profitable anyway.

Kiro 1 year ago |

> I'm pretty sure

If you're not actually sure I don't understand how you can make a post claiming they did it without your consent.

rich_sasha 1 year ago | |

For more common British English phrases and their (mis)translations, see https://expatsincebirth.com/2018/03/04/what-the-british-say-...

blowski 1 year ago | |

One reason I didn't go back and check was that I always turn this off. Of course, I'm fallible and may have made a mistake here, and so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. Either way, I encourage people to check.

The other reason is that they didn't send me any kind of email telling me they were going to charge me.

lozenge 1 year ago | |

This is British English for "I'm sure".

wnolens 1 year ago | |

That's not what OP claimed.

solardev 1 year ago |

Charge it back on your credit card

blowski 1 year ago | |

Absolutely, I'm going through that process at the moment. I posted this in case it helps somebody who doesn't have that protection or has cashflow issues.

qmarchi 1 year ago | |

Just note that without evidence, it becomes he-said-she-said, and a chargeback doesn't negate a contract to pay.

blowski 1 year ago | | |

In the UK at least, the vendor needs to show that their process was transparent and fair in order to fulfill their side of the contract. One of the examples specifically called out as unfair is "renewing without sufficient notice".

In this case, they didn't send any kind of email before or after payment.

solardev 1 year ago | | |

For small enough amounts, at least in the US, the credit card company will sometimes just accept it and give you a courtesy credit without going through the whole investigation.

And regardless, having too many chargebacks will often get the merchant into trouble. Just having to deal with the hassle of it is bad for their business, a good way to get back at them for poor service.

yieldcrv 1 year ago |

You were studying for leetcode

Been there

Antoninus 1 year ago |

The same happened to me a few years ago with educative. Scumbag company.

enceladus06 1 year ago |

Just do a chargeback.

bentoboox 1 year ago |

The majority of sass products auto-renew. Everyone of us likely forgot to cancel a subscription at some point.

It doesn’t give you a right to shit on a startup because you forgot to cancel

blowski 1 year ago | |

I actually do have a right, very specifically my statutory right under the UK's "Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation, and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013" which requires that vendors provide clear and timely information about automatic renewals, which I assert educative.io failed to do in this case.

Startup or not, I expect vendors to be compliant with regulations.