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Yes, OVH sends a bill seven days in upfront. I'm pretty sure they also send it to him because it's automated and thus the same for every customer (OVH doesn't customize automated tasks).
This is not how telecom contracts works in Poland. First signup is MAX 24 months and if you don't explicitly tell them to renew it (phone/mail/system) you are getting monthly contracts after that. Sue if you need // Also it's nothing new - it was first named 'klauzula niedozwolona 4431' in 2013...
On top of that with the new law introduced end of last year telecom operators are now forced to inform client (at least 30 days before end of contract) what are his options - It's ending, you can sign up new one (here are current promos!), you can end it, you can let it convert to monthly. You need to have clear communication from the client that he want to extend (even to monthly) now.
It's not only legal, it's standard practice.
It's basically an entry in the books under accounts receivable. The sale is made, and thus it is recorded as revenue, which in turn generates profit.
The thing is, this also generates a liability. You have a years worth of service to provide so you record that in your accounts payable. But chances are the accounts payable is absolutely tiny, especially on a server being renewed for a 3rd year, which had probably broken even for OVH within the 1st 6 months.
In theory, OVH could record the sale, and borrow against it. A contract for $1,000/yr and profits of $900/yr should allow OVH to borrow ~$450 basically immediately. Which in theory could fund their growth.
It's just accounting practices, which I generally do not like.
Between companies, the contracts can specify almost whatever they want. Which is why I had asked the OP if he signed up as an individual or a business.
If an individual, then he probably can break out of the contract just fine because he should enjoy a great deal of consumer protections. A contract is not valid (with retail consumers) if it is fundamentally unfair. That is... the unfair part of the contract becomes invalid. The fair parts remains. The unfair parts that work in favor of the consumer also remain. But a contract between 2 companies? Yeah you need to do your due diligence. I suppose we need to create work for lawyers somewhere.
and that's what I'm gonna do fuck orange, and their 10 mbit line, when I have 3 fiber optics next to my house, with at least one already connected to my house.
also literal translation of that clause :
In the case of an agreement concluded for a definite period, it is automatically extended for a period of 24 months, in accordance with the current promotion and the price list on the date of extending the agreement, unless the Subscriber expresses a different declaration of will within 60 days before the expiry of the agreement concluded for a specified period.
So I was half right
That's the bit that really pisses me off about some (often German, from what I've noticed) contracts. That should be outlawed, IMHO.
There's no 3 year contract.
They attempted to collect a whole year after taking 12 monthly payments.
Where you guys keep talking contracts is silly.
Then there should have been no change to his billing cycle and another monthly payment should have come off, not an annual payment.
They attempted to charge his credit card for an entire year but he didn't have the funds. How can you say his billing cycle never changed after 12 monthly payments changed to a single lump sum?
Bullshit. Name them, post the contracts. If you're signing up for a price promotion, after your year is up, you have no further obligation to renew annually. The contract will spell out your penalty if you cancel in the first year and no penalty after your year is up. You'd start a new contract to be obligated for more years. ANOTHER CONTRACT, not continuing your existing contract.
Right, with monthly fucking billing. Let me know who and when they decide to change to an annual payment after you were paying monthly.
There's no three year obligation as an option regardless of what was set. The screen also implies he can be on monthly payments and not forced to pay annually. You seem to be proving my point.
The support agent made NO MENTION of obligation for another year aside from an automatic renewal setting defaulting to renew. He finished his obligation after the second year. The agent even said so by saying he just needed to disable automatic renewal and not "you have a third year of your contract). This is fact.
If the renewal happened with another monthly payment he'd eat it and disable renewal and this would be over. But instead they want the entire amount, and by your logic, he's now committed to another two or three years!
At least you get the latest promotion and not stuck overpaying for old hardware/service.
No 3y contract but a 1y contract which renewed twice. So collecting another year after the first years is just as stated as in the contract. I wonder why you expect the yearly commitment to end after they took 12 monthly payments? In the default contract of OVH it says the service renews by the time of the minimum contract length which is 12 month in this case. They just executed the contract the OP accepted (without the OP reading it carefully maybe).
The annual commitment can continue, but they switched from monthly billing to annual at the same time, a change to existing service he wasn't aware of.
We don't do that here, though. The service would continue but you wouldn't be reobligated for more years. I'm curious where the OP is from.
We don't know what contract he accepted since the terms of year 2 are different from year 1 since the billing cycle changed, hence, a different contract.
That can't be disputed.
Again, they didn't changed back the billing from monthly to annual. He cancelled the service so they collected at once the outstanding amount until end of contract. This is common and no change to the billing cycle.
If the billing cycle changes, the contract remains in place. They just renegotiated a part of it and only this part is adopted, everything else is untouched.
>
Notice of cancellation != cancellation.
If someone put a notice of cancellation before the end of a contract, the notice then is not honored (immediately), the service is live until the end of the contract, billing cycles resume and invoices keep coming.
The service provider is under no obligation to honor termination "at once". The customer is under no obligation to honor collection "at once".
Everyone is gangsta about contracts until judges kill clauses that violate laws and precedents.
Thing with OVH is that the first and second line support is quite expendable so they will almost never help with anything non-standard. You have to try the classic "I want to speak to your Manager" line, they cannot refuse you to talk to their manager. At the very least they will offer you to write an email or a ticket to the Manager. Most of the managers I had dealt with in CA and EU have been quite nice and flexible.
I was in a similar position as you, on a pay monthly 2 year contract, that got renewed after the 2 years ended, and I noticed it when I was in the second month of the 3rd year. A few calls and tickets to the Manager in CA and I was able to convince them that it was an honest mistake, and they simply set the server to manual renewal which expired by the end of the month and got deleted.
Your situation is a little more complicated but I dont expect them to be assholes about it. You have to talk to support though, instead of getting opinions online, and again, ask for the Manager if it doesn't go your way. AND BE POLITE!!!
Canceling your contract becomes effect immediately, you're cancelling the services after your paid (or obligated to pay) time. Means you cancel now the contract for in a year. Because of this, auto renewal is also deactivated and because you deactivated it with your cancellation it's collected all at once.
If you agreed the termination of the contract different in the contract you cancelled (which is the case in their default contracts) there's not such.
Guess OVH's default contracts are proofed. Very likely he wouldn't be the first one to go to court and so there's already comparable judgements.
Contracts don't get cancelled, unless they become null/void through extreme circumstances like harassment, lawsuits, vandalism, violence, hacking, abuse, etc. Not even after notice of termination.
Services do get cancelled.
If you meant "cancelling your service", I highlighted the timing contradiction in your own statement.
If your contract is open end, you're cancelling it at some point. The contract (or better say auto-renewal) is cancelled immediately, hence the one time withdrawal but the service is cancelled at the end of your paid period.
I don't know where you got that. He didn't cancel and then receive a bill for the remainder, he's saying he found out about a large payment that failed to be taken from his credit card and that triggered the ticket where he specifically states he can't cancel it in the portal.
Please go back and read the OP, you have a few misunderstandings.
"I didn't renew the yearly contract and instead decided to pay month by month)"
He made a 1 year obligation and finished it. At that point, he can enter into another annual agreement, go monthly or cancel.
He chose to go monthly and not have an annual obligation. Or that was his expectation.
If you're telling me that you start a service with annual obligation, after it is up your only two choices are to continue annual obligations or cancel? It's very common practice to just go monthly and keep services going. That is what customer wanted and expected.
It wouldn't be the first time a customer support agent said "yes, yes, we can do all that" and then later finds out that wasn't the case. It's really common and why people record phone calls and get chat transcripts.
Frankly, it's poor customer service the way it was responded rather than responding to the monthly billing to explain where the customer may have been mistaken. The user expressly detailed why he was confused and specifically pointed out going monthly the year before and got no response on the most important detail.
Anyway, I'll never do business with OVH or any other company like this. You may not either when consumer protection laws catch up for you.
OVH has a documented history of automation gone wrong, so we can't really be sure if the OP really messed up or it's OVH's glitchy UI/portal.
"OVH is super-confusing. Interface, website, billing, everything."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16723918
That's exactly my takeaway. Customer service failed to provide adequate response to specific conflicting understanding by customer. He couldn't logically or simply explain the situation and customer respond back "oh, that makes sense" and resolve the matter.
Well, I and many others have no problem at all understanding the customer service or the terms of the contract. But obviously, you and op do so I guess there is room for improvement. As they say, it's impossible to make something idiot proof because there will always be a better idiot.
The context of that reply was related to glitch, which is almost always an edge case.
The experience of others of others not encountering the glitch is irrelevant.
They also notoriously broke EU laws by not selling (Kimsufi) to non-French for many years. Only once i had a (local, not French) court title they changed their opinion.
It's OVH. They try.
Hey,
Been a while since I posted an update on this thread but I thought some people reading this might appreciate it.
The first agent that replied to the tickets seemed to only care about the invoice being generated and considered that a valid reason to ignore all appeals and reasoning that I tried to make regarding the situation.
After not receiving any updates on the first OVH ticket where I asked for an explanation on the sudden change from month to yearly, I received a follow-up saying: "this is closed", no further comment or explanation by them was made. I assumed that it was a way of them saying "fuck off and go away".
Few months after that, I started receiving phone calls from the OVH debt recovery department, I tried to get an explanation about why the server changed the billing terms without my interaction, I also suggested they give me credits on the platform instead of forcing me to use a server I no longer needed, they didn't like this idea.
Phone calls eventually went silent until December 2023 when I received an email saying they were going to take legal actions in 10 working days.
I tried, for the last time, to reach an amicable resolution with OVH before this went to court, the agents this time seemed a bit more engaged on the case but said that the invoice had to be paid.
I insisted that they had to review the case carefully because their system did seem to be in the wrong. Here is why:
First year, invoice was paid full upfront (contract was signed on the 21th of that month).
Second year was paid month to month (same cost as first year but around ~6% more expensive), which I believe gives us a strong hint that the yearly commitment was cancelled somewhere in the first year of the contract.
Third year, there is an invoice generated (1th of June) for the full year, I request a cancellation of the service approximately the 9th of that month.
The reason I took a few days to notice is because I would have expected the invoice to follow the month to month billing, instead, the 9th of June, OVH tried to withdraw the full yearly amount from my account.
I believe I didn't have the funds to cover the whole year and that's why I didn't notice what was happening until my bank and OVH sent me an email saying the payment failed, few minutes after reading those notifications is when I made the first ticket trying to cancel the service.
Whether I had exited the contract prior to that moment shouldn't have been important to the first ticket, because I raised the cancellation request ~12 days before the original contract was meant to renew (21th of June), according to the contract, any request made 10 days before the renewal should have been approved.
While trying to reach this new amicable resolution in 2023, OVH stopped replying and a debt recovery firm reached out to me, asking for the full server amount + added service fees.
I explained the situation to the debt recovery firm and asked them to send me all the documents and information they have regarding this case, they said they would followup with OVH to see what was happening (at the same time, the firm automated system kept sending me threatening emails, very cool).
Today I received an update from OVH saying that they are sorry for the issues this might have caused and that a refund for the invoice is being generated.
When they threatened with legal in Dec 2023, I was going to pay the invoice and get over the whole situation since $2k is no longer a major burden on my financials, however, after reading the whole case and remembering all the details, I considered that I wasn't fully in the wrong and it seemed unfair to pay the full amount they were asking for, even if that meant risking lawyer fees and reaching court.
I will ping some of the members that participated in the thread, it's been a while and I have no idea whether notifications are being sent lol
@deank
@Falzo
@angstrom
@JasonM
@drizbo
@TimboJones
PS: To those defending the contract and my obligation, I never tried to exit it like nothing, I was willing to take responsibility of my actions, however, I expected OVH to be able to explain the billing changes and maybe let me get the funds back in platform credits.
I was very stressed and borderline bankrupt when this happened, this server meant nothing to them and, I just wanted them to help me understand why I had to pay the full amount upfront.
Fortunately my company managed to recover and we are now spending 5 digits/month on AWS and other providers, it's hard to say whether this would have gone to OVH but we did start prototyping some of our (back then) new infrastructure on their cloud service.
Have you asked for cancellation or just "haven't renewed"?
at a guess it was still under a contract with month to month payment. Maybe call them?
@joams That's great news. Thank you for that detailed update. I'm really glad it worked out so well for you
By the way, what line of business is your firm in?
Since they are not here, let me say the line.
The end is nigh.
OVh had or have some of the most f*ked up billing system in past.
remember the thread
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/183908/sys-kimsufi-closing-down-migrating
They said they will not close my servers .
I renewed them for another year and then they closed the servers and told me i will get refund and i never got.
I Never received the refund . and they cancelled all my servers.
Support were talking Gibberish neither they want to understand what i was saying or maybe I was unable to .
Its the current situation .
I Try to Click on refund and this shows.
and it has been a year.
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/191096/how-to-fix-ovhs-broken-renewal-system-since-they-don-t-give-a-shit
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/189412/thread-to-help-ovh-fix-their-weird-payment-issues
They honestly don’t care, at all. Their platform is beyond broken
Anyway, glad your company is on a better path @joams