DoNotPay Promotes Itself As Helping You Get Out Of Subscriptions, But Keeps Charging Customers After Telling Them Their Own Accounts Are Closed

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the well,-look-at-that dept

We’ve been writing a bunch lately about DoNotPay, the massively hyped up “AI lawyer” run by Stanford dropout* Joshua Browder. Again, the company has received a ton of publicity regarding its “robot lawyer,” often from some of the publicity stunts that Browder pulls. Again, I think the underlying concept of using technology to help people solve problems is a good one. And that can include helping them to get better access to useful information that was, historically, kept behind expensive legal gates.

But throughout this saga, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that DoNotPay is smoke and mirrors, and very little is legitimate. Even Browder’s publicity stunts appear to be nonsense.

Still, as we keep pointing out, some of the fundamental services it claims to provide sound like they could be useful: for example, helping you cancel subscription services that companies don’t want you to cancel. We all know about these experiences. Companies make it easy to sign up, but impossible to cancel. DoNotPay is frequently lauded for helping users cancel such subscriptions. It brags about this service on its website.

That page has a long list of ridiculously poorly written “articles” that read as if they were all generated for maximum search engine optimization on how to cancel various services. Who knows if these articles were auto-generated with AI. Kathryn Tewson asked Joshua that question and he never answered.

Anyhoo, if your big claims on your website are how you can use DoNotPay to “fight corporations,” “beat bureaucracy,” and “find hidden money,” you’d think that your own service would make it easy to cancel your subscription without runaround and bureaucracy, and not keep charging people long after they’d been promised the subscription was canceled.

You’d think.

Over on Twitter, Sasha Perigo told the story of how she noticed that DoNotPay had been charging her $3/month for years last summer, despite her never remembering that she had signed up (though she admits it’s entirely possible she signed up and just forgot about it).

After emailing DoNotPay, customer support person “Quinn” told Sasha that her account had been cancelled. That email was on July 20th last summer, noting that her account would run through the end of the last monthly payment, on August 12th.

Except… Sasha just checked and found that DoNotPay continued to bill her $3 every month since then.

Kathryn Tewson leapt into action, tweeted out Sasha’s thread, and told Browder to refund Sasha’s money.

Now, Browder has Tewson blocked on Twitter, but it appears that either he or someone else on staff is monitoring her account, because 27 minutes after Tewson tweeted that out, Sasha noted that DoNotPay DM’d her and said it had cancelled her account and refunded her money. Of course, it also claimed that the mistake was that she had two accounts, except (as Sasha correctly notes) this makes little sense, as she was only charged once per month…

Also, it turns out that Sasha is not the only one. In her replies, Eve Kenneally pointed out that they have been trying to get DoNotPay to cancel for two years without success. Hilariously, Eve’s tweet shares a screenshot of an email from “Stacy” at DoNotPay saying “We’ll get this sorted out for you in no time.” And that was literally from February 1st 2021. Exactly two years ago.

Sasha DM’d DoNotPay about Eve’s account, and magically that was finally cancelled as well, with DoNotPay dubiously claiming that it hadn’t been able to find Eve’s account until Sasha called it to their attention. Then, they “sorted” Eve’s account within mere minutes.

Meanwhile, I’ll note that while the subscription fee for DoNotPay that Sasha and others were paying was $3/month (a number low enough to miss), if you try to sign up now, it says $36 every two months (which seems like a weird way to bill).

It sounds like DoNotPay jacked its prices way up (though, oddly, sticking to the $36 number, as the original pricing was $36 per year. A TechCrunch article from a year and a half ago says that the price was $36 every three months, as opposed to every two months today). I guess once you’ve raised $27.7 million dollars, and your tools are as flimsy as Tewson discovered last week, the best you can do to try to show your investors (including Sam Bankman-Fried and his bankrupt firm Alameda Research) that you’re growing the business is jack up prices and try to sucker in more users, and then make it hard to cancel.

But, really, you kinda have to ask yourself: how good can Browder’s “AI” service be at canceling other services when it can’t even cancel people’s own DoNotPay accounts? Do you really want to pay $36 every couple of months to find out?

* Earlier on Tuesday, Kathryn Tewson called out the fact that Browder both claimed to have a degree from Stanford in Computer Science and to have dropped out. After she tweeted about this, even though Browder blocks her, his LinkedIn magically changed to say that he had dropped out (though, oddly, it still said he had a B.S. degree from Stanford for a little while and then was updated a second time to just note that CS was his “major”).

Filed Under: ai, canceling subscriptions, joshua browder, subscriptions
Companies: donotpay