Shady marketing practices

While WPForms has some nice features and is one of the easiest contact form plugins to set up and configure, their aggressive marketing tactics are very shady and dishonest.

For example – after you enable form backups with the free version of the plugin, they send you a weekly email with your form activity. Ok, sounds like a nice feature, right?

Well, the email doesn’t make it clear that the number of form submissions it shows you are lifetime totals, not the previous week’s totals. Many people, when seeing this email for the first time, will think that they have somehow missed a lot of form submissions, because the number of actual submissions in their email is very low compared to the number of entries reported in the email from WPForms.

So what happens if you fall for this little trick and pay for the Pro version of the plugin so that you can retrieve all of those “lost” form submissions? Well, you might see that all of them are spam, because apparently WPForms counts spam entries in its total form submission count.

Now what happens if you decide that you don’t need this feature and want to cancel it so that you’re not charged a yearly subscription fee in perpetuity? I’ll tell you what happens – you get to click “cancel subscription” at least 8 times, as you are sent down the worst customer retention hellride on the internet. Prepare to be inundated with pages upon pages of reasons why you should keep paying for this plugin. Click “cancel”, get taken to another page that screams at you in ALL CAPS why you shouldn’t cancel and how you’ll be losing so many awesome features that you don’t need and probably never will. Do this EIGHT TIMES and eventually you’re done, and the subscription that you mistakenly paid for is cancelled.

I get having maybe one extra confirming step to keep customers when they try to cancel. I think that everyone by now is probably used to that single “are you sure you want to cancel?” message when they try cancel something. But EIGHT TIMES?!?

That is some seriously shady and aggressive marketing. Of course, predictably, I will never use or pay for this plugin again.