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Busuu.com claims to be a free language learning site. However, the free aspects of busuu.com are very limited. In order to get more benefit from this site, users are enticed to pay for a 'gold' membership for one, three or six months. Busuu.com will automatically renew the membership just before it runs out FOR THE SAME LENGTH OF TERM THAT THE MEMBERSHIP WAS INITIALLTY TAKEN OUT FOR, i.e. if you have taken out a 6 month membership, then busuu.com will automatically renew it for another six months if you have not cancelled before the end of the initial membership. Should you decide to cancel your membership, say after one month, you will already have paid for six months and busuu.com will NOT REFUND any money already paid, effectively tying you into a contract. Shame on them for their awful business methods.
The complaint has been investigated and resolved to the customer's satisfaction.
It isn't a scam if you sign up for something with no refund policy and then decide to cancel. My gym, my college, and my violin teacher and my karate instructor all have the same type of contract. Because of this contract, I pay 12/month for the use of 24-Hour Fitness and less than $10/ month for Busuu. Busuu is comparable to Rosetta Stone in the benefit I am receiving, and talking to native speakers every day is so motivational!
It is true they warn us. Also it is the same everywhere. it is a contract so you can't stop whenever you want. The longer you take the cheapest it is. So if everybody cancel after 1 month then they won't never earn their living ! Do you think the gym clubs would allow you to stop your 12 months contract after 2 months for free ? well you should go out there if you don't know how it works.
Busuu is free for a lot of stuff so why complaining ? If you want to go further you pay ! As simple as that !
This seems like a pretty standard practice - but thanks for the heads up. I wouldn't call Busuu.Com a scam though! I have used Busuu.com for only a couple short months and right now I am actually using my learned Italian while sitting in a hotel in Lake Como, Italy. $99 for 1 year of unlimited learning of multiple languages while their method ACTUALLY WORKS is a small price to pay and hardly classifiable as a scam.
Dear Groned,
thanks for your comment. We are sorry that you are disappointed by our service. Nevertheless we are informing CLEARLY on our subscription page that the membership will be renewed automatically (which is wanted by many of our happy customers which simply don´t want to fill out the payment info again month after month). You also have the chance to cancel your membership at ANY time and still enjoy the service until the end of the paid payment. Unfortunately we are not able to refund your membership just because you decided to cancel your e.g. 6 months membership after 1 month. That´s why we offer a monthly subscription in order to give you the chance to test our services. Anyhow you can test for free our premium membership for 7 days so we assume that once you subscribe you are sure about your decision. An automatic renewal is actually common business practice in many subscription based services such as e.g. mobile phone contract (imagine you would need to contract your mobile number every month again...), gym contract etc.
Anyway we are sorry that apparently you didn´t like our services and we can assure you that we are continuously improving our platform and have recently received a 70% satisfaction rate among our premium users in an internal survey.
The busuu.com team
Is it common practice to manually enter a person’s card information to charge them? Is it common practice to not allow people to cancel this “auto renewed subscription” in your app (where you offer premium and a majority of people use)? Its bad business and the app isn’t even good that’s the sad part.