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 stated that you are a Dev yourself, but then I was expecting that you should have tried to check their API and make the calls with curl, Postman, Insomnia or whatever, but apparently you never tried.
Perhaps the problem was in the third party plugin you were using from the beginning and they cannot really be responsible for that.
I am pretty sure they have monitoring on their API backend and can spot a problem, as I seriously doubt that if the problem was with their API you would be the only one experiencing those problems.
You’re absolutely right. I didn’t. Because I wasn’t invested in troubleshooting it. I have a full-time job, a family, etc.
The issue here is not about what wasn’t working. The issue here is being told off when simply asking for a refund.
The support person has even acknowledged that my profile was showing no downloads.
They are, as evidenced by the screenshot the support person shared showing the number of API calls. And they actually did have a problem with the API, which required an update to the plugin, which is all laid out at the start of my post.
This is partly on you, they asked for logs and you deleted the vast majority of it saying it wasn’t relevant. What if it was? Then when they asked for logs you just shot right to refund.
They’re an ass, but so are you.
No, I provided logs, twice. Then they ghosted me for almost a month. I’m not complaining, all I did was reply again asking if they could do the refund.
You seem to be missing a hugely important point here. I didn’t want tech support, just a refund. The core tech issue did not matter. They were pushing for logs, and I went along with it. Regardless if the logs I provided were complete or not, I got told off for asking (not demanding) a refund NOT tech support.
Edit: why are you assuming that I deleted the “vast majority” of the log? Where did I mention the total size of the log?
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.
The process everywhere is:
that’s it. Nothing else is required. Anything else is optional.
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.
Yeah that did seem pretty rude.
Picture 3 was exactly that, you then lied to them in the response about providing the logs and them not responding. Your first two images show them Responding and explaining why those logs don’t work.
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.
Thats what happened in your third image, they denied your refund request and asked for unedited logs. Which you claimed to have already sent, but they also explained why those weren’t good enough.
You than pushed on
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.
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.
They asked for logs, gave you a reason for why. You claimed you already did, even though they explicitly told you why and to not edit them. You were also the only one with this issue, that’s not likely something on their end, which wouldn’t be eligible for a refund.
Again, they are an ass, but look in the mirror, your obstinance didn’t help.
If you’ve got nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
Calling a stranger an ass because they’re not living their life exactly how you would, in such a minor unimportant way, is not nice.
Their Download stats look very sus though. Maybe they process their logs three days late, but that drop does not look pretty.
That drop was from when they had modified their API which required applications using the API to update. That’s actually where my story begins.
Edit: actually I checked my email chat again and it was a “nasty bug” that caused the issue. And I think it was that bug fix which resulted in the API changing.