Canceling Premium LinkedIn Service

Steve Tylock

Received a comment this week that needed a bit more that a quick reply in the article – and thought this would make a good topic for a new post.

Joe has apparently been trying to stop paying for a LinkedIn account for a couple months now, so let’s see what advice we can offer him.

The comment…

Joe doesn’t pull any punches. This is his comment:

Joe McM

I made the mistake of joining the paid membership on LinkedIn!!

First of all, some of the things they promise such as priority customer service do not exist.

Second, once you realize that you don’t need the paid service, their is no way to undo it. I have been trying to cancel my subscription for about 3 months now. The only way to cancel is to send them an email. The problem is they don’t reply. So they keep charging your card month after month.

DO NOT PAY FOR LINKEDIN SUBSCRIPTIONS!!!

I’ll admit to taking out one harsh statement from his message, but I also corrected a couple typographical errors, so I think that works out about even. His points remain:

  • Inadequate customer service
  • Unresponsiveness
  • No end to his billing woes

That’s a situation that would make many people upset.

The concept

During March, I polled readers about paying for accounts and registered responses from those that had used a paid account, but no longer did so. Check the results of “Most Users Opt For Free Account“.

I stand behind my advice of “When to Pay for your LinkedIn Membership” – a paid account makes sense if and only if you need the features that you gain when you pay for the account.

That isn’t the case for many people. (as shown by the poll results)

Joining is easy

Isn’t that the way though – every vendor would like to setup a mechanism to auto-bill consumers, and makes it quite easy to do business.

Leaving – that is hardly ever easy.

  • There’s the pass-off to the manager to get approval
  • Asking if we could do anything to change your mind about it
  • And just plain failing to take action

Just join any promotion offered by your credit card company to get the full experience;-)

Way out

If you look through the LinkedIn Help Center, you can get to a page dealing with this topic:

Cancelling Your Premium Account

And Joe has accurately pointed out that clicking through their instructions involves filling out a form and sending it off. You’re not likely to find a phone number.

And since I have never done so, I can’t comment on the responsiveness of the LinkedIn team after that. At various times through LinkedIn’s history I have heard both good and awful reports in this area.

But that’s what should be done first – and take note of your correspondence. (screenshots are a handy tool…)

Other options

So let’s say you’re like Joe and you’ve done this and it hasn’t resulted in any success – what next?

Well don’t just stand there, get help from your friendly bank.

Two main thrusts – challenge the charges, and/or change the account.

I checked into the “ways to pay for your premium account” and see that LinkedIn only accepts four main credit cards. The first and foremost protection offered consumers is the ability to challenge transactions.

And I found this page has a very good explanation of how that works and instructions: How to Challenge a Credit Card Bill. The consumer contacts the credit card company and says “I didn’t order this” and provides backup material to prove it. In this case, you’d say “I asked them to stop, and they didn’t”. The key phrase to remember is “dispute”, as in “I dispute these charges”. (and consider my comment before – you’d like to have proof  that you asked them to stop, so that screenshot comes in handy now…)

So that gets your money back. Can Joe go back three months? I don’t know – I’d ask.

Next – you want to cutoff the continuing charges – even if LinkedIn doesn’t take the hint from the dispute. Ask to change the account / credit card number. When LinkedIn submits the account for billing, they’ll be denied.

Now – you may have to deal with LinkedIn saying “Hey, your credit card is no longer valid.” And your response is “Hey, I asked you to stop billing me and give me back a basic account and you didn’t”…

Either way – you’re not paying, and LinkedIn has a great deal of incentive to fix the situation. (It’s never a good idea to be billing credit card accounts that are not valid…)

But wait – protect yourself first

Oh – did I mention you should BACKUP YOUR PROFILE AND CONTACTS early on in the process – you never know how things could go, and I’d hate for you to have to start from scratch…

Personal experiences?

Hey, Joe can’t be alone out there – I’d love to add stories on both sides of this topic.

Have you stopped paying successfully? Have you had issues trying to cancel?

To your continued success,

steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock

Related Posts

67 Comments

  1. I have been instructed by my company to cancel the premium account and remain with a standard account. please advise how to do this

  2. Tim,

    Not sure how you could read the article and not see it, but please search for the text “Cancelling Your Premium Account” above and click on that link.

    steve
    (And remember, I’m not connected with LinkedIn, I just know my way around the system)

  3. Hi Steve (and various readers),

    Sorry for being late to the party, but I ran across this blog and wanted to update everyone that our subscribers can now cancel or downgrade their subscriptions on their own whenever they want. If you go to your settings page, there is now a link that says “Cancel or downgrade subscription” towards the left side of the page. If you click on that, we will confirm that that is what you want to do and downgrade/cancel your subscription. No need to contact customer service and wait for us to respond anymore. The link to the FAQ you have listed above was updated to reflect this change as well so hopefully that will lead to a much better user experience for everyone. Hopefully that helps alleviate any fears anyone has about being “trapped” in one of our subscriptions.

    Derek Homann
    LinkedIn Customer Operations

  4. Derek,

    I appreciate the update to this topic.

    And yes – I checked on my earlier link and it does seem to be an updated page as you’ve described. (But since I’m not a paying member, I can’t “try it out”-)

    If readers should happen to downgrade in the future and wanted to report on how it went, I’d be interested to hear.

    steve

  5. Hi Steve,

    I have had a premium account on LinkedIn as it was offered as a one month free trial, I didn’t use the features though but while cancelling it was easy from the Settings page where you just have to click on “Cancel or downgrade subscription” and that’s really it.

    They didn’t charge my credit card after free trial period and I am now downgraded to Basic membership.

    Yash

  6. Yash – thanks for the first hand account!

    It’s hard to work through issues I haven’t personally dealt with, and it seems that the standard deviation for satisfaction is rather wide;-) I was happy to hear from Derek above, and even more happy to hear your story.

    That makes it more likely that people will try out the premium service – even if they ultimately don’t need or care for it.

    steve

  7. Steve,

    That’s right. Maybe more people will try it out. But personally I will recommened to take on trial offer especially if someone offers some products or services as one of my friend who had this trial offer for a month won two clients by sending them InMail about his product offerings at a discounted price.

    Its worth a shot for new startup to try for a month and see what response they get before becoming/continuing paid membership.

    Yash

  8. Hi,
    Just send the cancellation request today. It suppose to be cancelled on 21 July. Will let you know.

    Olya

  10. The instructions are ambiguous on whether by “cancelling” the account, you will lose all your contacts. I too opted for a one month trial, and did not find the difference perceptible, so went to ‘downgrade’. The new site offer to ‘downgrade or cancel’ allows for downgrade to a lessor, still premium account, or ‘cancel’. I don’t want to cancel my account. I want to downgrade to a basic account- so felt stuck. I contacted customer service for clarification, and they “canceled my premium service” and said I would “transition back to a basic (free) account”. I STILL don’t know what that means to my collection of contacts and groups? The ambiguity was enough for me to fear ‘cancel’. Linked in is supposed to be professional, and I thus, the word cancel still feels like they are being ‘tricky’, and unprofessional. It’s an easy fix, and I hope they do it.

  12. I’ve had a rather unpleasant experience with the matter at hand.

    I cancelled my Premium subscription 4 months ago. Last week I received a substantial fee on my credit card statement from LinkedIn.

    Apparently, when you cancel or downgrade your premium subscription, it only downgrades you to a Business account and still charges you a monthly fee.

    After some investigation, it seems that one can downgrade to a basic (free) account by request to Customer Service (which I still haven’t heard back from) or by cancelling my account.

    Conclusion: Don’t opt into Premium Subscription!

  13. AC,

    Sorry to hear about your experience.

    I have never had a paid account, and all I can relate is the experience of readers.

    Derek from LinkedIn suggested that there was an option on the settings page to do so, but perhaps more than a year later that has changed…

    Thanks for commenting,
    steve

  14. I tried cancelling my premium account at the beginning of the summer. They conveniently never replied until after the billing date. It is now October and I am still getting a charge on my credit card every month. When I check my account type, it says I have a basic/free account…yet I’m still being charged.

  16. Hi

    I paid for an upgraded account yesterday and while they processed my account they have not updated my access. I asked their Help function and customer service to either rectify this and they gave me some load of tosh about it being a known technical error but have no time frame as to when that will be fixed , and they have also refused to refund my money. There is no one you can ring at Linked IN. I have connected with the Community Leader Derek Homman mentioned here but wondering if anyone has experienced this and how they have fixed it. Its a bit shocking I don’t know any other services or vendor who would essentially say thanks for your money but you are not getting service and we don’t know when you will.

  17. Danielle,

    Sorry to hear about your experience. Since it is a new charge, if you contact your credit card company you probably can reverse the charge…

    (You won’t get the premium service, but it sounds like you’re not getting it anyway)

    steve

  18. Hi Steve,
    I decided to take the free trial offer for the premium account about a month ago. Received an e-mail a week before the trial ended, and then, having no intention of paying a subscription in the first place, cancelled my trial Premium via the website. However I saw this morning on my bank account that I have been charged the amount of a monthly subscription!! I’m not an active user of the website and rarely check it, but apparently when I went to the site to verify I still have an active premium subscription on Linkedin! Shocked and disgusted I submitted a contact form on their site. I was thinking of contacting my bank to dispute the charges but the thing is, I never had any ‘proof’ or ‘confirmation’ of any sorts when I cancelled the first time. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

  19. Pia,

    I’m not sure what is involved with a credit card dispute, and I don’t know what proof is involved. Contact your card company for that – but I’m reasonably confident you can talk to them and they will work with you.

    At the very least you change the number and eat just one month’s charge.

    steve

  20. Hey there Derek Homann,

    I will call you LIAR. I’m trying to cancel my subscription when I found you’ve been charging me 27 euros per month (and 10 as it was advertised). I’m trying all morning to cancel my subscription, and I’m just being redirected to a contact form. I’m now contacting my bank.

  22. Yes, I also just received a nasty shock when Linkedin automatically billed me for an annual subscription renewal.

    While I wanted to renew the professional subscription anyway, I regard this type of auto-billing without any email warning or setting to stop it as poor ethical practice; it speaks very poorly of Linkedin and frankly, out of principle, I will not renew my subscription with them again.

    And appalling that there is zero customer service. What a bunch of…

  23. Elan,

    Just recall – if you do nothing, it will auto-renew on you again.

    The most definitive advice I can repeat for you is to, somewhere in the 11 months before that happens, cancel the credit card number you’ve used for this so that it cannot be billed …

    steve

  26. I’ve had a very similar problem as some of you describe in that Linkedin seems to be using deceptive billing practices to entrap customers into paying for premium service much longer than they intend.

    I registered for the free premium period early last year so that I could send a bunch of inmails to potential customers and then used it for another couple of months.

    Once I was through with the many inmails I wanted to send, I canceled the premium service on their web site during the early part of 2014. Unfortunately, my wife and I have a joint credit card account and she pays that particular credit card, so I did not think to double check that Linkein had actually canceled my account (I assumed that the cancelation process via their web site was sufficient). They did not cancel and continued to bill me all year long and into this year as well.

    So, they have been charging me for a service that I have not used at all since I canceled it (since I did not know I had it!). The catch 22 is that they now request proof of cancelation of premium service, but most people cancel on the web site which does not give proof of cancelation (very few probably send an email since the web site offers a page on which one can cancel).

    I feel that this is an incredibly dishonest practice by Linkedin and I am so furious that they’ve taken advantage of me for so long that I am strongly considering gathering enough aggrieved customers (there are other discussion sites with similar complaints from customers!) to form a group of customers that have endured similar experiences.

  27. Additionally, visited “my account” page on Linkedin and attempted to delete my credit card number from their web site and, lo and behold, it is impossible to do. So, a customer is allowed to input any credit card he/she wants on his/her own, but is not allowed to delete it on his/her own? They force us to ask Linked in to remove the credit card number? Are you kidding me?

    All of these actions seem so disingenuous by Linkedin, that I don’t think we should sit here and take it. Frankly, a company like Linkedin should be embarrassed for what they are doing to their own customers.

  29. same experience…just found out today..very very angry now.. we should do something together. @Derek J. McCracken, I am on board!

  30. Tianqi,

    Sorry – I have better things to do with my life.

    My advice remains – call your credit card company, and have them change your card number because of suspected fraudulent use, and move on.

    Best,
    steve

  31. Using a cash card that you keep only the first month payment can be a solution. If you are not happy with it they can not charge you anyway the next month, if you want to continue for a couple of more months than continue to put month by month until you want to cancel it.

  32. Alp,

    A burner credit card – I like the idea. Probably have to watch the monthly fees, but it seems one way to approach this.

    (Though I have to question the overall solution – it’s like going into a committed relationship with your bags packed every night expecting that you’ll be leaving…)

    steve

  33. I had the same issue with Premium as most people here- signed up over a year ago and let it go only to realize it got renewed without me giving approval. Fine, that’s how it goes. This time I’ve tried to quit. I’ve looked through every piece of information on my profile and my account and found what I thought was the way to cancel my Premium account and did so. At least four times over the past six months. Today I got hit with a bill for over $500 because I’m still a Premium Member. Hell, I just tried to quit this afternoon and it’s STILL saying I am. WTF? How does a major company-

    1)Not make it easy to quit something they’re paying for
    2)Renew people without asking
    3)Not take them off the account when the person changes their account
    4)Get away with not having a customer service phone number
    5Not having anyway to contact LinkedIn that’s not a form
    6)Oh wait, you can contact them through Twitter. Thanks. That’s really helpful so I don’t have Twitter.

    I have to say that out of all the things I’ve listed, the fact they don’t have any customer service is the most mind boggling. Unbelievable

  34. Jon,

    Hate to have to give you a platform to vent… My best suggestion still stands – have the credit card company change your card number.

    I don’t know how LinkedIn handles such – but be sure to save your profile and contact information as explained in other articles in case something goes awry.

    Best of luck,
    steve

  35. Hi Steve,

    After looking around, I posted a comment on their Facebook page (something other people appear to have done), something stern and angry without sounding insane and quickly got a response, by email and by Facebook Messenger. They’re giving me a full refund and cancelled my Premium Service just like that. So, either the issue that I had is common enough they’ve stopped fighting it (the Better Business Bureau has dozens of similar complaints) or the posting of negative feedback on their Facebook page squeeked their wheel but worked well enough to make them quickly respond.

    It’s kind of silly that the only way to reach them is via Facebook or Twitter but there it is.

    Jon

  37. Hi Steve,

    I also have the same problem here. When I go through for solution, the best way to cancel the payment, no way we can do that the LinkenIn also don’t have any respond for it. I take the solution, go to the bank cancel the old credit card and make a new one. So right now I’m happy without worries about linkedIn. Just want to share on this topic.

  39. I’m not seeing anyone mention that LinkedIn actually submits each payment they are sucking out of your account from a different vendor identification, making it impossible to cancel these charges unless you cancel your card altogether. It looks very suspicious to me that they would set it up this way unless they were trying to make it very hard to stop their activities without canceling the entire card on your account.

    I’m in the middle of contesting six charges for a Premium membership I didn’t sign up for and absolutely no reason to ever want their upscale membership. I’m retired, I am not trying to launch a career or a new business, why pay them for a service that doesn’t do anything for me except steal money from my account. I downgraded myself but the damage is done, it will take another two months to get them to respond to my bank, from the billing setup I can only imagine that they will fabricate something to attempt to stick me with their six months of stealing from me. Are they planning on forging my signature? I’m seeing them as absolute crimminals now.

  40. Steven,

    I have not heard first hand stories of fighting charges – but have long suggested that a certain way of ending the charges is to cancel the card.

    Sorry to hear of your events, and good luck pursuing your action.

    Best,
    steve

  41. Hi everyone,

    I am now trying to cancel the premium account by going through the steps but the problem is that after pressing on my Manage the page pos up with the message

    “We’re getting things cleaned up.

    We’ll be back soon.

    Follow @LinkedInHelp on Twitter to get site availability updates.

    In the meantime, learn what’s new at LinkedIn by visiting our blog.

    I’s been like that for hours…
    Does anyone have an emil address for them asI really do not want to get charged for something haven’t used?

    Thank you in advance

  42. Kedy,

    Sorry to hear of your mishap, but I hope you kept trying. That did sound like a temporary situation.

    I’ve got no direct contact from them.

    Remember – if you have no direct success, change the card number, that is sure to end charges on it…

    Best,
    steve

  43. This is a nightmare, and it should not be. I don’t respect any business that operates in such a fashion as to prey upon it’s customers in such a way that creates so much anxiety. I only used the “premium” option as a last resort because i needed to hire someone to perform a film shoot in a city I was traveling to, otherwise i never would have even used the option. That seems to be the trick – to force people to try the premium option when and if they want to contact a business person who advertises thru linkedin – and then, once the free month is over, BAM – $575 on the credit card and no decent way to contact anyone – convenient for Linkedin – NOT for your customers. I have left three messages and hope I will get an answer soon and I will dispute this through my credit card company.

    As if I don’t have anything better to do…thanks Linkedin, for ruining my day.

  44. They just charged me over $500 for an annual subscription! OMG!!! I only needed it for less than a month.

  46. It sounds like LinkedIn switched to an annual subscription (vs a monthly) and charged everyone in the system the next year.

    Oof…

    steve

  47. This is getting ridiculous! I posted of a similar problem last year and they don’t seem to stop and, in fact, have gotten worse if now they’re charging for an entire year! Freakin’ ridiculous! Part of the problem is that the single complaint voices are so small, that they’re not going to change their deceptive (and illegal?) practices until those voices united and get much, much louder.

    WE should not be the ones that have to change our credit card number in order to get off of LinkedIn’s disingenuous charges. Something is wrong with this issue when it’s WE that have to try to inconvenience ourselves in order to avoid sleazy charges.

    Instead, it is LinkedIn that needs to change.

    Last year I did end up settling with them when I complained and, although they didn’t refund all of my money, I believe it was maybe around 50%, 60% of the total amount.

    Regardless, if someone wants to threaten LinkedIn with a class action suit, I’m happy to join and add my story of woe to the many customers who are getting ripped off by them.

    This “snake oil salesman” practice needs to stop but, instead, it’s gotten worse!

  49. I was unexpectedly billed for an annual Premium subscription this month too (~$600). However, LinkedIn resolved my complaint quickly and easily, so I wanted to share.

    Like many here, I had accepted a free 1-month Premium trial. Once it ended, I expected to start being billed monthly (I had been on the Premium service once before in the past), but I was shocked to notice on a recent credit card statement that I was billed for an ANNUAL installment.

    The first thing I did was check LinkedIn Help, which says no full or partial refunds (yikes!), so I was contemplating contacting Visa or BBB. But once I calmed down, I decided to try asking LinkedIn politely for a refund (I was not using any Premium features anyways).

    I quickly canceled my Premium subscription, and then submitted a case (under Help section). I was pleasantly surprised that I received a friendly response in only a few hours, saying that my account had been reset back to Basic/free and that I would receive a full refund shortly.

    I am very satisfied with this resolution. (BTW, if you look up LI on BBB.org, you will see a fair number of complaints, but many of those about billing do end with refunds and satisfactory conclusions.)

    That said, I agree with some of the others here that getting in/out of the Premium subscription is confusing. It might make sense for LI to make that process clearer, to avoid all this clean-up work that needs to happen after.

    I’m just glad this got sorted out so I can continue feeling positive about my experience as a user of the LI service (I do like the platform very much).

    Hope this helps others out there!

Comments are closed.