If you cancel your subscription, any content which you still have in your account will revert to the privacy options of the free plan. If you don’t want some content to be public, delete it before making this change.
Whoever at Prezi manages this UI should definitely clean it up to actually say that, but the behavior itself doesn’t seem crazy to me.
IMO they ought to change it from a single checkbox to a pair of radio buttons, and give something along the following as options:
“You are about to cancel your subscription. However, you have x private presentations in your account. Private presentations are not available without a paid subscription. How would you like to handle this?”
(_) Delete all x of my private presentations
(_) Make all x of my private presentations public
And then have a button or link as well where you can go if you wish to review your private presentations in order to delete any of them prior to making the remainder public.
Also, in the listing of private presentations, provide a button or link that allows you to download a copy of each of them before you delete them.
Let's be real, there's no benefit to involving the private/public setting here other than making the service more sticky / difficult to leave.
This company seems to do web based slide decks. What file format do you give users, HTML and CSS files? A PDF printout of their presentations?
I agree that giving users a copy of their data would be ideal, but without a program that can view the data, the data itself might not be that useful.
There's a lot of options of varying difficulty. But they already have code to produce PDF, and dumping some proprietary lossless representation of their internal format doesn't seem unreasonably difficult. If they're shy about their secret sauce, fine, encrypt that second copy. It's only for the case that this user wants to come back to the service later on.
I can imagine plenty of business reasons not to do this, but very few technical ones.
I feel like you're not accounting for the time and effort it takes to maintain backwards compatibility. Once you give a customer a file that uses your internal format you have to always make sure your service will be able to read it back in. Going forward you aren't maintaining just 1 format, you're maintaining N different ones.
But does that mean it's unreasonable to require companies to do it? We already force plenty of engineering with regulation (GDPR, HIPAA, FERPA, PCI-DSS, SOX) because these are things society wants, even if the company would rather not.
Also, maybe the proprietary format doesn't need to work forever. Just add a disclaimer that it's only guaranteed for, say, 1 year? Or just "best effort"? All the file does is give the customer an incentive to return to Prezi later on. It would be in their own best interest to support this, if they weren't allowed to sidestep the whole issue by making it difficult to leave in the first place.
1. At a growing startup, nobody is incentivized to implement the necessary-but-not-initially-related-to-growth features, like a sane account closure and unsubscribe process.
2. This, the easiest path forward was essentially "we'll turn your private account into a free account, where everything is public" because implementing something where there would be a deletion or export option in the unsubscribe flow would take more work, and nobody is getting bonused on that.
Otherwise it's hard not to impute a malicious motive to suddenly making private data public.
Then just say If you don't want your content to be deleted, pay us (with a side of "entitled freeloaders can fuck right off")
Kinda what Flickr does now. Which I dislike (finally cancelled my Pro yesterday), but I respect that they can't keep providing the old service for free.
As others have mentioned, I think "keep the content and make it read-only" would be the best possible experience, but I also understand (1) that would probably require even more work; and (2) sometimes you need to make business decisions to keep people from unsubscribing.
Then we'd be seeing posts about momentary subscription lapses (or glitches along those lines) resulting in tons of user data being irrevocably lost.
I think the safest option would be to force the user, when they unsubscribe, to select between "keep everything but on the public free plan" vs. "unsubscribe and then delete everything."
Sure, and this is where, for example, the old Flickr policy was great. You could only see the 1000 newest pics, but all the rest of them were actually still there (and inaccessible to anyone), in case you decided to renew later.
But the way I see it, if you didn't stay on top of payments, my service wasn't important enough to you anyway. A grace period with notification seems perfectly reasonable to me before I delete all your data.