Premium billing pain

[philipmulcahy]

I am slightly at a loss for how to deal with an increasing rate of chargeback attempts.
This post is initially going to be a cathartic rant (catharsis is good!), but I'm hoping it can turn into something constructive.
I am very interested in users thoughts on this subject - please do join in!

Chargebacks are bad because:

1. So far, none of them are justified
   They ignore the subscription terms and/or make accusations of fraud.
   It's clear that some of them happen when a user sees a charge they don't recognize and don't do their homework before firing their accusations.

2. They consume a lot of my time, and emotional energy
   Both users and their banks tend to use pretty brutal language (which is compounded by their self-serving non-arguments).

3. They enrich Stripe, who charge $20 no matter what the outcome, for sitting in the middle and taking responsibility for doing nothing except relaying the claims and counter claims.

4. The overall costs of one user getting a few dollars back cancels out about 5 other users' contributions, which is money that the hospice doesn't receive.

What have I done?

i) Made the sign-up language much more assertive:

What am I contemplating doing?

i) Naming and shaming folks who initiate chargebacks without apparent cause

ii) "Banning" those users - e.g. making it hard for them to free-ride after they have inflicted cost on the project

iii) Looking at removing auto-renewal - this will inevitably generate angry users when their scrapes stop working, and thus support work for me, but it'll not be jumping through hoops with Stripe and users' banks - see below for some options.

iv) raising the rate above $7.50/year: e.g. socialise the pain

End of Auto Renewal?

Auto renewal presents at least a couple of problems:

1. users forget about it, ignore warning emails and then get embarrassed/angry/unreasonable (the reason for this post)

2. the platform I'm using (ExtensionPay) doesn't allow existing users to be charged the new rate - they get their renewal at the original rate rather than the current rate.

It's not yet clear to me that I am able to use ExtensionPay to have "one year and done" subscriptions - research required, but at the moment there appear to be some alternatives:

A) no autorenew, but otherwise leave things the same - this would have the beneficial side effects of eliminating most failed payments (that happen when autorenew fires on an expired card); and of only taking payment from an actively engaged user.
B) one-off lifetime payment - difficult to know how to price this one, and most apps that do it end up cheating in the long run - new functionality ends up happening in a new app or a new super duper subscription etc.
C) Pay for calendar year - you buy a calendar year. If it's late in the year, then you get less value for your money.

What would you prefer?

[philipmulcahy]

Here's the first obviously blatant false chargeback user's ID: wdshopping@comcast.net, seemingly based in Houston.

[philipmulcahy]

Here's another: corimlemmon@gmail.com apparently some kind of wellness "doctor" in Boulder (lots of woowoo on their website, but not many suggestions of any connection to reality in my opinion).

Meanwhile Stripe have announced that the non-refundable dispute handling fee is going up to $40, so even when I win (which is most of the time, and as far as I can tell I should have won all of the time so far: all of the disputes have alleged fraud without specifying how/why), the net cost is going to about $35 - that's ~eight subscribers' revenue gone. because Stripe don't seem to be on the hook for the fees they took on the original charge. A price hike is probably the right way to fix this given we cannot practically go after the dishonest folks who are doing these chargebacks.

[philipmulcahy]

New twist. Chase (card issuer) seem to be using the customer IP address I allegedly supplied them in my evidence package being different from the customer's actual IP address. There are two problems with this.

1. I don't have (or supply) customer IP addresses. (e.g. Chase are confabulating excuses to support decisions that seem self serving)
2. Even if I did (I didn't), internet users are known to use more than one address (work, home, cellphone...)

[philipmulcahy]

A rash of fraudulent chargebacks (where the customer neither contacted me nor responded to polite requests to explain why) mean that the combination of:

1. Stripe dispute fees and

2. time I have to spend to challenge each chargeback

...has become unsustainable.

In response, am raising the annual charge to $25
This will probably reduce the number of paying users, and also hopefully the number of chargebacks, but probably also increase the proportion of actual business users who might properly depend on the extension's business features, and so are less likely to blow up our relationship when they don't recognize a line in their card bill.

If you are a personal user who depends on the paid version, your existing subscription price should continue unchanged - this change should only impact new sign-ups.

[philipmulcahy]

Latest user to ignore all the writing in the sign-up flow, and cost the project (and so Princess Alice Hospice ~$40): abbelynn@icloud.com. Apparently "product unacceptable".

[philipmulcahy]

#331 springs to mind - narrow scope logging

[philipmulcahy]

I forgot to post an update: I implemented #331 so that some lightweight logging on premium user scraping is passed back to me. The users log-in email is encrypted using a public key that is embedded in the extension. Only I have the counterpart private key, and the decrypted data stays on encrypted storage under my control.
It seems to work, but since I did it, no-one has initiated a chargeback I consider to be dishonest, so I'm only occasionally looking at the data to check the pipeline is still working properly.