Another Renewal question
 

According to new fastmail policy when you upgrade or downgrade:

<quote>
Now you will still get a credit, but only be up to the cost of the new subscription you are moving to
</quote>

Does this mean that if you have more than a year left on a full account and want to upgrade to an enhanced account (for a shorter term). That any funds remaining will be lost? If one is upgrading it should be allowed to use extra funds to purchase storage space? --david

You will lose the remaining amount, yes.

The new subscription (whether going up in service levels or down) most have a total purchase price at or above the amount your account is currently worth. Otherwise, the extra money will be lost.

(I disagree with this, but what can you do..?)

So downgrade to member means losing the money forever?

Yes.

Did I mention I disagreed with this? :)

And this seems like an important enough issue for FastMail to have sent e-mail notification to all customers. It's underinformative to have account credit without realizing what it can/can't be used for.

When you think about it, most services don't allow "any" money back when you paid for a year of service. This way, you can downgrade and use the time (money) you have left on your account to pay for the downgrade. (you just have to time it right so you don't loose anything). I'd say that's better than having to stay with the service for the whole year if your not using the features.

Sherry

Sherry;

Personally, I'm not upset about the removal of the upgrade/downgrade action in general, I'm just upset that they didn't post notification prior to committing to the change.

I would have thought they would lock the accounts of those who weren't playing nice, notify the rest of us about the upcoming change, and THEN proceed.

I agree! (they may have been worried that many would take advantage, while they could, before it went into effect?)

Sherry

Given that a few people were abusing it, we decided it would be better just to make the change, then announce it, rather than having to run around and find any new accounts where people abused it after learning about it disappearing...

I really don't think it's that much of an issue. Really the only thing you can't do is downgrade, and use any remaining credit to buy aliases/bandwidth/disk quota. That's about it.

If you downgrade/upgrade, you still get credit for the remaining amount towards the change of status.

Rob

Yep, that pretty much covers all the options one might have wanted to purchase with credit. :)After downgrading from Enhanced to Full can any credit be used towards future account renewal payments?

I assume you can first gift certificate, and then upgrade/downgrade so you don't lose anything.

This email system is raw and simple, but this pricing scheme is getting incredibly complex!!

Hehehe... this is actually what I was considering.

If not that, I was going to downgrade back to Member and wait on other features to be available before going back to Full.

I thought the ability to upgrade and downgrade was great because it gave users the ability to try out other service levels.

No, you assume wrong. :)

If you gift certificate someone, you have to have money in your account pool. Money wouldn't exsist in your account pool unless you are able to downgrade first -- you would have already lost the money by then, because downgrading will not have the "extra" money go into the pool.

Basically when you upgrade/downgrade/change service period, whatever credit you have from your remaining subscription will be used towards the new one, but any leftover above and beyond the new subscription is what is lost.

Rob

Would it not be better to put everything on one page, so several account changes could be applied at once.

It's not just the problem of downgrading, there is also the change:

full+domain+alias --> enhanced

at the moment the only efficient way to handle this is to wait for the end of the billing period.