LinkedIn is Evil

You're missing that you should just start contesting the charges. You made a good faith effort to downgrade. Chargebacks sound like the only way to get their attention.

Odd, I've gone from free-paid-free-paid-free a few times now by following whatever the process was at the time.

One thing I suggest for any sites like this is to get one of those "disposable" credit card numbers with a configurable time/balance limit. Login to your online card balance viewer portal and there is usually an option for this. Eliminates a lot of "please please cancel my account" debates...

Maybe downgrading is considered an edge case.

Sounds like a good YC business: a service that will take care of the hassle of canceling you from other services.

I really like LinkedIn. It's been useful to my business a bunch of times. But I've never been tempted to pay for it. What prompted you to upgrade your account?

Although many people use LinkedIN, I don't as there are many things in thier T&C I am not happy with regarding the sharing of my personal information and those in my network.

Any idle News.YC'ers in Mountain View? Perhaps a personal visit...

http://maps.google.com/?q=2029+Stierlin+ct,+Mountain+View,+C...

The same thing is happening for me. I just noticed that they are billing me $20/month and I'm also getting an error when I try to send them a message via their form. Not being able to downgrade in a simple way is Evil. It reminds me of AOL in the bad old days.

LinkedIn seems to be an all-around stubborn and inconvenient site. I had the same experience, but in my case it was in deleting my account. The deletion process was unnecessarily difficult, so I deleted all my contacts (I think the account ultimately did get deleted though). The reason I wanted to delete my account in the first place had to do with the fact that it was overly restrictive in managing, showing, deleting my own content. The last straw was that I had posted a question in the public Q/A section and there was no way to delete the question permanently when I did not want it to be shown.

I've had problems with their email notifications. Despite repeated requests to be removed from all emails, I still keep getting some. I've written to them about this as well, with no response.

In general they appear to not really pay attention to user requests.

Yes, I had similar experience while closing my account on LinkedIn. I had to email them, to which they replied with asking reasons. But why should I bother giving them reasons about why I want to close.

They really made sure that I don't have any option to close the account in one-click (ok, 2 clicks max. for confirmation!)

Oh man...this sounds similar to turbo tax online...when I filed my taxes for last year, at the end of the process I upgraded to the next level which was of course more expensive. Then the upgrade did not really help with the return and I decided to downgrade back to the standard personal level...but..oh no...I could not downgrade at all..WTF...and their site says once you upgrade you cannot downgrade...that's a boat load of whatever...but I would never imagine LinkedIn doing something similar...the error is probably temporary..

I had almost exactly the same experience, through the error message when I submitted my comment to their "customer service" people. The message still went through and they did cancel my unintentional "subscription". My error occured because the system somehow decided that I wanted to create an account at the same time as I submitted my message, but an account with my email address already exists (for obvious reasons).

Hope your email goes through as well.

I don't know if this one is different from the link you used, but it seemed to submit for my test email. I chose Premium Accounts > Cancel-Downgrade as the categories.

http://linkedin.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/linkedin.cfg/php/enduse...

I've downgraded from them. Yes, they only do it by email, but they did it like they said.

They need to fix it though.

Xing isn't any better.

When you register, you get all the features. After a month, when you don't upgrade your account, you only see who was on your profile (picture) but can't click on them. You can't even send messages to your friends anymore. You can't search for people, etc...

Is that opportunity I hear knocking at the market's door?

Yes, I had to write them too. I spent a bunch of time discovering that. It's piss poor customer service. I'm over it.

How's that down arrow coming along?