They won the argument and lost a customer who wanted to pay, and praised their app to everyone
I'd been a Bevel Pro subscriber for over two years, paying happily the whole time. Then my card expired, my payment failed, and my subscription lapsed.
When I went to resubscribe, I was no longer offered the price I'd been paying for years, only the new, much higher pricing.
All I wanted was to keep paying at the rate I'd had as a long-time subscriber. I wasn't asking for anything free. I even told them I'd happily move to the annual plan. But the app wouldn't let me subscribe at my old price, so I reached out to support to sort it out.
What followed was a long, drawn-out process: one request after another, screenshots, receipts, order numbers, account emails, bug reports, each step stretching it out instead of moving it forward, and at the end the answer was still no.
I've had billing issues with plenty of other companies over the years, and not one has ever made a returning customer jump through this many hoops just to keep paying them.
They could have sent a single message, and I'd have resubscribed on the spot. Instead they "won," and the result is a loyal customer who walked away, a real pity for everyone
And to be clear: the expired card was 100% on me. I should have been checking it, and I'm not pretending otherwise. But that one slip is the only thing I did wrong here. Everything after it, being shut out of pricing I'd earned over two years and the runaround when I tried to fix it, was on them.
The app is good. But honoring your promise to keep loyal customers means more than a line in an announcement. It means how you actually treat them when something goes wrong, and here that fell well short.
