So this isn’t meant to be a post bashing the devs/owner of OpenSubtitles. This is meant simply as awareness.
A few months ago I signed up for the VIP tier at OST ($5/mo for 1000 downloads a day) for a bit to populate my catalogue of videos with subtitles as my father uses my Jellyfin server and he’s lost a lot of his hearing. I also wanted to support the development a bit. At first the service seemed to be downloading a bit, but then it stopped. I waited a few days and it would download at most one or two a day (despite a few thousand videos not having any subtitles). I look around online and found that OST had changed their API and the Jellyfin plugin still needed to catch-up with a newer release. No big deal, so I just waited.
Then the update released which specifically stated that the changes to the API calls were made. I waited a few days, nothing. I uninstalled the OST plugin and reinstalled, still nothing.
So I figured something was wrong either on my end or the server-side, but I didn’t want to bother getting into it. I’ve been planning to rebuild my Jellyfin server with newer hardware with HW acceleration for decoding and encoding. I sent an email to OST support explaining what I’ve been seeing and asked if I could get a refund.
The person who responded asked for logs so that they could help troubleshoot. So I obliged.
They said it wasn’t much help and to get even more logs. Which I provided again.
I even removed over 14 thousand “[query]” lines to make the logs more readable. They said there wasn’t anything there that was useful, and asked me to try again. I indicated that Jellyfin has a scheduled job that checks for missing subtitles and pulls as needed once a day. But I said that at this point I’m just looking for the refund.
A while passes by but then I get a notification that the subscription is going to be renewed again, so I cancelled before that happened and reached out again about the refund. At this point it was more about the principle of the matter as I originally just asked for a refund and that got side-stepped into a support request.
Then I got this as a response:
Which resulted in this:
I waited over two weeks to write this post. I wanted to wait and see if somebody replied back to me with even just an apology or something. If they had originally told me that doing refunds is hassle for them I would have let it go. But telling me off and then deleting my account is just… special. I was astonished at the response and cannot fathom that being the response from any company taking payments for a service.
And I’m not holding a grudge of any kind and I get it, I used to do IT support and some days can be tough dealing with annoying emails. But in my defence all I asked for was a refund because something wasn’t working. In any case, I just wanted to bring this to the attention of the Self-hosting community so that others can make more informed decisions. To be clear, I’m not advocating anyone to pull support. In face I think they should have more support as it’s an invaluable service. Despite the treatment I still plan on getting the VIP subscription again at some point after I rebuild my Jellyfin server. But I also don’t think that customers should be treated like this.
No one was placing blame. No one is claiming they didn’t do their part. And regardless if manual calls worked, I wasn’t able to make use of the service.
The point of getting a refund is not even an issue here. It’s the rude and hostile response and deleting my account for a reasonable request.
They could have just said “no” and that would have been it. I would have been irked, and then gotten over it by the next day.
Thats what happened in your third image, they denied your refund request and asked for unedited logs. Which you claimed to have already sent, but they also explained why those weren’t good enough.
You than pushed on
In the 3rd image they said “you are asking us to debug a third party application”, which I wasn’t. They also said “if we can’t help we can definitely do a refund”.
If I don’t give them the logs then they can’t help. If the logs I provided aren’t good enough then they can’t help. So then refund.
I really can’t figure out why you’re such a dog with a bone on this. Why choose this hill?
Honestly, what’s at stake for you here? What are you trying to accomplish? The point you’re pushing so hard is completely irrelevant. It’s like you’re trying to deflect from the core issue. I really wonder why.
That’s after they called you out in the second image for not having any API Queries.
If you don’t provide logs you aren’t following due process and they can deny your refund. After all this you put your foot down saying you sent the logs and they didn’t reply, both of your images show their reply and explaining why the logs weren’t valid.
Trying to point out that you also caused this issue………… again, they are asses, but you also completely ignored their valid request and claimed you did what they wanted even though they explicitly told you why you didn’t.
The hill I’m dying on is someone calling someone else out because they can’t comprehend they partly led to the issue.
You’re not entitled to a refund ever, and just demanding a refund isn’t going to put you in anyone’s good list.
What due process? Where are you getting this from?
I never demanded a refund. Not once. You keep saying that despite being corrected over and over, which means you’re either dense or are mad for being shown you’re wrong and just need to win the argument. Or maybe you’re the dev themselves trying to be anonymous, who knows.
Good customer service involves giving a refund when asked, even when inconvenient.
Good customer service absolutely does not involve insulting a customer and deleting their account.
So the hill you’re dying on is yelling into the wind about something no one is talking about.
Every company is going to investigate a refund request to make sure they aren’t being defrauded or ripped off, people do it all the time. So they create policies and have to legally follow them to keep their business license.
Yes just issueing a refund is the proper customer service way, but you also want to make sure yet aren’t being defrauded, so you can also investigate odd scenarios. Like you being the only one with the issue….
And all you’ve said in all these exchange’s is you asked/demanded for a refund. The nuances of the semantics need not apply here. So what have you corrected other than reiterating each time that you demanded/asked for a refund?
You agreed to their terms of service when you signed up for their service…… so yeah if you ignore their due process, this shits entirely on you.
I keep forgetting how entitled people are these days….
This is very true, and a good point. But the fact that my issues persisted after they had a complete outage with that API gives credence to my claim.
Categorically false. You yourself have said that I provided logs when prompted, regardless if they were incomplete.
Customers not receiving a service they paid for are absolutely entitled to a refund. That’s literally how commerce works.
And your attempt to shift the focus of my post to me being at fault just won’t fly.