Comment by PunchyHamster
Comment by PunchyHamster 5 days ago
that just sounds like customer not paying for service not getting the service
Comment by PunchyHamster 5 days ago
that just sounds like customer not paying for service not getting the service
I'm just guessing, but this:
> and have posted my rough mixes [...] on my SoundCloud for more then ten years
...easily implies >3h of uploads, which is over the free plan limit. If you're over that limit and stop paying, yes, it makes perfect sense that they'd threaten with deletion of some of your existing uploads.
They first hide your songs and as time goes on they start threaten to delete your songs if you dont pay
What should they do instead? spend money continuously holding your music on disk forever even though you aren't paying them for the service? Sounds like they are being cool about it by keeping it around for a while and warning you before deleting it.
The marketing move of offering an unlimited plan reveals that storage and traffic are not that expensive and someone made a choice that light users will subsidize heavy users. With that, hiding your data from you and subsequently deleting it, at least without first encouraging you to download it within some post-downgrade grace period, would be a choice, not necessity, and is user-hostile.
If it is an actual necessity—a service chose to market an unlimited plan to attract more users, and then realized they are losing money on storage and traffic so much that they would unapologetically burn bridges with existing users who showed themselves as willing to pay (who maybe needed to downgrade temporarily for whatever reason) with the above move—and yet their strategy is apparently to keep offering that plan (in hopes to turn things around with more light users joining?), I would question whether that service has serious issues with even medium term planning.
No matter their actual costs to provide the service, I'm struggling to see why they should not immediately delete all of your stored files upon cancellation of the storage service.
They are a European company, so you are the customer, not the product and recipient of subsidies. They use less manipulation and dark patterns than an equivalent American company.
You pay, you get service. You don't pay, you don't get service. If they can't bill you, they should try to communicate with you for a few months before treating it as a cancellation. If you cancel, then your choice is clear and you should expect your service to be immediately terminated at the end of the current billing period. If their service is storing files for you, termination of the service means deletion of the files.
There is no need for a grace period when you knowingly and voluntarily make the decision to terminate a file storage service.
As a listener I'd pay (a reasonable amount like <$5 per month) to only listen to mixes, especially if it can be filtered by bitrate.
Their best feature is social feed - I only see reposts from people I follow. But for branching out / discovery might be cool to see what their feed looks like, so something like "show followees feed".
Overall what Im saying is they treat their non-paying customers better then their paying ones. Once I was a paying customer after having and using my free account for over 7 years then converting to a paying customer and having to cancel Soundcloud became hostile.
Did you have more stored data than the limit for stored data for unpaid accounts?
The service is freemium, so they had a limited account. Decided to pay for a premium account. And apparently can’t downgrade and get back what they once had.