SOLVED - 12 month Commitment Period... keeps adding months

[Solved - See my response down below. This is just a case of misleading UX design on the part of the Unity license team.]


Anyone else seen this issue?

I have six Pro license subscriptions under the one account. We cut our team size and I need to shed a few of those licenses.

My 12 month "commitment period" started December 2018. My understanding is that after that 12 months, you can add and remove licenses on the same account on a "per month" basis. At least that's what I was told by Unity sales. That 12 month period should have ended in 2019.

However.... on my account the Commitment Period says "Dec 13, 2018 - Oct 12, 2020" so of course I can't make any changes to my subscription plan.

But here's the WEIRD part. Last month it said "Dec 13, 2018 - Sept 12, 2020" and the month before it said "Dec 13, 2018 - Aug 12, 2020" – it appears to be adding an extra month to my commitment period every single month.

I started noticing this in July, and have screenshots from August to October showing this time period changing. As soon as the billing rolls over, another month is added to the end.

I wouldn't actually care if I was only paying for one license, but I'm losing $450/month to excess Pro licenses that I should be able to remove. This is a huge hit to a single owner LLC like me.

Thoughts? Ideas? I've already reached out to my Unity success advisor with screenshots, posted to Unity on Twitter to no response, and kind of feel like I'm screaming into the void here.

 

I don't know...but it seems to me that they are adding the month as you are paying it, not anything else. I'm guessing you pay the thing somewhere around the 12th. These things as far as I understand it are pre-paid, meaning that you are now "commited" to the next month because its already paid. Theoretically you should be able to cancel it, although the cancellation wouldn't apply until the end of the month as you've already pre-paid this month. It makes good sense to me. If it doesn't let you apply the cancellation for that future date, then maybe indeed you have an issue and would need to proceed with your communications with the help desk.

 

Yeah, it won't let me remove seats. That little remove seat button is grayed out, and all I can find from Unity support is that if this button is gray it means you are still within your commitment period, which for me should have ended a long time ago. I don't actually want to cancel my subscription, I just want to change my plan from 6 Pro licenses to 3.

According to Unity's support docs, the subscription progress date should not change:

https://support.unity3d.com/hc/en-u...-of-the-commitment-period-on-my-subscription-

"On the next page, there is a section called 'Subscription progress'. Here, this will show the final date of your commitment period on the right hand side, below the progress bar. The bar will fill up as you progress through your commitment period."

But on my account that date changes every month, it just keeps pushing back one month every time my payment is made. I'm already out over $1500 for this issue (have tried to remove seats every month for the last several months) and am concerned now that this is a perpetual bug.

If this is (yet another) bug in their subscription software, how many other accounts are affected besides mine?

 

Solved!???

I just discovered that if I change "Choose how to renew" from "Immediate Renewal" to "Scheduled Renewal" it will indeed let me remove those extra seats. I have lost so much money to this terrible UX design of an interface, and Unity has pocketed all of it. I'll leave this post up in case others hit a similar confusion point and stumble on this thread.

Frustratingly... I don't think that interface is designed like this by accident. It's intentionally misleading and one more reason people hate this business model. Love the tools. Hate everything to do with license management.

 

no, it isn't
had recently similar experience when I didn't cancel my plus sub soon enough and there's no option to cancel once a sub period has started
so i wanted to do it preemptively this time only to find that the link to activate cancelling ( which activates several popups with meaningless messages advertising benefits of pro subscription which expired long ago first ) is carefully almost invisibly styled as normal hyperlink contrary to literally every other active element on the page, stuck at the very bottom in the corner of the page
no, not a conicidence - almost proper dark UX pattern
left a nicely formulated feedback similar to the above god knows if anybody actually read it