Charged 2x my rate for 10 months and can't get a refund after 1 HOUR AND 15 MINUTES in support chat

[ns1355]

Last year, while subscribed to the student rate, my account was hacked and the hacker upgraded my account to Family for 2 months. I reached out to the help chat to get this resolved and they refunded my account the 2 months worth and reverted my charge back to the student rate. I asked the support staffer if my account would continue with the student rate ($5.24) for the subsequent months, and he responded absolutely, which is what I wanted. I thought everything was resolved...

Just one month later, though, I was charged $10.50. And I was charged $10.50 for the standard subscription for nine months after as well until I just tried to reach out to report the problem. For 10 months, I was charged the premium standard rate despite the support staffer explicitly assuring me that I would be charged $5.24 for the following year. Since I changed my password and the school year began, I don't always vet every thing on my statement, but when I noticed the error, I reached out... yet again through the same support chat that failed last year.

I WAS ON THE SUPPORT CHAT FOR 1 HOUR AND 15 MINUTES!!! The first two support staffers did not offer a solution and when I repeatedly expressed my problem, they "disconnected" due to "technical problems." How convenient...

Finally, one of the staff members made an effort at resolving the concern. She offered me a refund for one month and to make the account free for the next two months. Credit to her... her hands are likely tied with just small fixes. While that is better than nothing... THE SOLUTION OFFERED BY SPOTIFY WAS TO REFUND JUST $10.50 OF THE $105 I HAVE BEEN CHARGED OVER THE PAST TEN MONTHS, $52.50 OF WHICH I NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN CHARGED FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE. That's ridiculous! I only got a fifth refunded of what should have been.

From the time the chat opened to the just getting one month refunded took over 1 HOUR AND 15 MINUTES. It never should have taken this long and three people to still only provide a 20% solution.

Still, they kept encouraging me to subscribe once again to the student rate. Why would I do that? You already made extra money form me resulting from support (lack thereof) after I was hacked and offered an inadequate solution.

[Elena]

Hey there @ns1355!

Thanks for reaching out to the Community about this. 

We're sorry to hear about your experience and we understand how frustrating this must have been for you. We'll do our best to shine some light on the matter.

The student discount is only valid for 12 months at a time and it needs to be re-activated manually when it expires. It sounds like this caused the misunderstanding.

After the extra charges for the Family plan were refunded, you went back to the student rate and our support adviser confirmed that. But it seems like the 12 months of the discount expired the next month and you needed to re-verify.

It's only possible to do that within the last couple of weeks before the discount expires and we usually send out an email reminder for that. We recommend checking your notification settings and your inbox and Spam folders for that email in order to avoid any issues in the future.

We can confirm that our refund policy doesn't allow us to refund payments after 14 days of them being processed, unless there was unauthorized activity on the account.

We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused and we hope this explains the situation a bit better.

We'll be here if there's anything else we can do for you.