NordVPN refund dark patterns

Tl;dr: if you want to refund your NordVPN payment, go to my.nordaccount.com/billing/billing-history?intent_rf=true. The last part, ?intent_rf=true, is the important bit. (If that doesn’t work, you’ll probably have to go through the full chat-bot flow first, see below. Or maybe they changed the magic bit.)

I have a NordVPN subscription since many years.

Recently I have been getting mails that my card is expired and that I should update it to keep the service:

I fully anticipated auto-renewal prices to be excessive compared to their multi-year plans, so I was happy with this. I’ll simply take a new subscription manually the first time I need it after the current plan expires.

Then today, I receive this:

Huh?! But my card is expired?! But I checked in my banking app and I do see a reservation there (new card, new expiry date, but presumably the same number). This is weird in itself (right?), but whatever, that’s for some other time.

So this is where the real fun pain begins, of trying to get a refund for this auto-renewal fee.

On the billing page (my.nordaccount.com/billing/billing-history), I see this:

I renewed a bit over 2y ago for 98 euro for 2 years+3 extra months, so 50/year (44 including the extra months). And now they took nearly 200 euro for just 1 year, over 4x more expensive! So yeah, we’re not paying that.

First step is to disable auto-renewal at my.nordaccount.com/billing/my-subscriptions. This is easy, but only cancels the next renewal for next year, not the current one.

Now, you may click around a bit and find the (never helpful) support center (my.nordaccount.com/support-center). We click billing and subscriptions and then request a refund. This gives a super helpful page (support.nordvpn.com/hc/en-us/sections/38324049616785-Request-a-refund¹):

We can click what is your refund policy? and the tl;dr is that it’s 30-day money-back for new subscriptions, and

Once your subscription renews, it’s no longer eligible for a refund under this policy (unless local laws require otherwise).

So that’s not very nice, but either way, they do show where the refund button would be:

but it also states:

If, however, you believe that the decision made by our automated refunds system is incorrect and that you have the right to get a refund in accordance with the applicable law, please contact our customer support team via the live chat option available at the bottom of the page, and we will review your case.

And indeed, I now see the following:

I’m 100% sure this grey button in the bottom-right was not there before, but I may have missed the chat with support button there. I was explicitly looking for the grey chat bubble, because this button missing seems to be a common theme on reddit, where it is suggested to disable adds, clear cookies, and switch browsers to maybe make it appear, but in the end none of those worked for me. But then I found this post which very helpfully directly links to the how to reach support page at support.nordvpn.com/hc/en-us/articles/19482416296593-How-to-reach-NordVPN-customer-support, which currently shows (at the bottom of the article):

So anyway, as suggested on Reddit and the help article, you can then ask the bot for a refund:

We can click the link it gives (my.nordaccount.com/billing/billing-history?intent_rf=true, I assume intent_rf indicates that we intend to refund), and now a Refund button appeared!

Clicking the button, we suddenly get the following offer:

This effectively reduces the cost from 200/year to 200/4year = 50/year, which is much more reasonable.

Newly available plans, on the other hand, are as low as 83 for 2 years + 3 months, which does come out quite a bit cheaper at 37/year, so we’ll just take the refund and later make a new subscription from scratch.

The refund request is now pending. Let’s see how this goes.

I suspect they regularly change the look of their site to make it harder for folks to find the right hoops to jump through in order to get to the refund pages. Also, why does the chat-bot need to be in this process at all? Can’t they just put the magic URL somewhere to start with? And why not just show the refund button always to start with? Many questions (to which we all know the answers… $$$).