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.
You’re not just entitled to a refund just because you want one, there’s a process to go through it and ignored it….
They wanted to know if the fault lied on their end or your end, one of them they would be liable to refund you, the other is actually on you.
So no, you require tech support BEFORE demanding a refund in almost all cases.
You’re just an entitled prick apparently.
there’s a process to go through it and ignored it….
The process everywhere is:
- request refund
that’s it. Nothing else is required. Anything else is optional.
And they are also completely free to deny your refund request as well.
There’s a due process and you choose to ignore it, and are now flaming someone for wanting to figure out if it was a them or you issue.
are now flaming someone for wanting to figure out if it was a them or you issue.
No. I’m sharing my experience with someone who sold a service that didn’t work for me, and in response to asking for a refund told me “I’m tired of talking with you” and deleted my account.
You got a service, I sure that if you place API calls manually it will work. For what are you asking refund, they done their part of deal.
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.
If they provided you the service advertised a refund is rightly at their discretion.
Sure. But that’s the point of the discussion.
They could have said no, but they didn’t. They responded rudely, gave me a refund, and then deleted my account.
