Roughly five years ago I told you about how Slack would proactively give refunds if any of our users didn’t use their service for a while. No requests, no forms, just a proactive “hey, we’re giving you a refund because a user has been dormant“. It’s amazing.
I’ve found that Sprout Social (an otherwise decent social media management platform) is the complete opposite.
With any pay-per-user software platform, I see three ways that billing can be managed.
- On the great side, you have Slack with their proactive refunds.
- In the middle you have most systems, where manually adding or removing a user immediately affects the price. This is perfectly fair.
- On the bottom (the very bottom) you have companies like Sprout that separate “people” from “users”, and then hide them on different screens.
Here’s how it works.
Say you have five users on Sprout and you need to add your new team member, Ben. When adding Ben to Sprout, they say “you only have space for five users, so let’s add a sixth so you can include Ben“. Perfect!
Six months later, when Ben no longer needs access to Sprout, you go and remove him from the “Roles & Team Members” page. Easy enough. Now you’re back to five “team members” on your account.
The problem is that you are still paying for six “users” even though you only have five “team members”. Removing a team member doesn’t remove that “user”, which is baffling. To fix that, you go into the [Manage user seats] section to actually remove his “seat”, even though you’ve already removed his account. If you’re confused, that’s by design.
If you don’t remove his “user” count, they’re happy to keep charging you for this empty seat, and they very emphatically do not give refunds for unused empty seats.
To add a bit more magic to this, as of this writing their system has a bug where you can’t even reduce your seats and you just get a generic “an error occurred” when you try. They say they’re working on it, but I have to imagine their incentive to fix it is very low.
Legal versus Moral
At the end of the day, what Sprout is doing is completely legal. Their contract lays it out, and they’re not the only company that does this.
But is this really the kind of company you would ever want to work with?
The world needs more companies like Slack and fewer like Sprout.
