💶Migration to Patreon & Premium Subscription Refund
How infuriating...
Welcome to our new knowledge base website!
This article is a bulletin and also serves as an opinion piece (mostly from the manager) to share some of our frustrations dealing with the Discord Support Team currently and previously.
Demonetization of Premium on Discord
In correlation with our public notice on our Official Discord Support Server on 12th May 2024, we have deactivated Discord's built-in (first-party) premium subscription button on our application.
We made this choice as for the last 5 months that we have employed using their first-party solution instead of our kludgy way of doing it through Sellix, we have not received any payouts from our users who purchase subscriptions from us.
Through a basic inquiry through Discord's Support Team, we received the following reply.
Hello again,
Upon review it has been determined that your account or the account of a Developer Team member is currently not in good standing. Good standing means:
You are not actively violating any of Discord’s Terms or Community Guidelines
You have not received a safety violation in the past 30 days
You have not been flagged for suspicious activity usually reserved for safety, abuse, and fraud cases and have no outstanding dues or unpaid charges owed to Discord.
If you were selling Premium App Subscriptions, we’ll provide a full refund to subscribers. This means, any accrued funds will be distributed back in the form of a full refund to users that purchased subscriptions to your Premium App.
The App will be blocked from Monetization and if applicable, you can file an appeal by visiting our Developer Help Center: https://dis.gd/app-demonetized once steps have been taken to resolve the issue.
Thank you,
The Discord Developer Support Team
Our problem with this reply from Discord, is that we have no idea which pointer is affecting our "standing" and there is no straightforward way to find out.
We have checked extensively in each of our accounts and there are no active violation warnings or known flagging for suspicious activities.
Actions Taken
We have proceeded to do the following in light of this incident being revealed to us during the 24 hour window from the reply :
Requesting full refunds for users who paid for premium via Discord's built-in button
Terminating the premium purchase button in our Discord App.
Migrated to Patreon for premium subscription purchases.
We deemed the response from Discord was neither valid nor acceptable to us as a reason of withholding our revenue.
Update #1 (21 May 2024)
We have an integration that sends out messages whenever a user has purchased premium through Discord.
Our manager has discovered during the timeline between deactivating the purchase button on Discord till today, some of our users' are still getting charged even though the button has been disabled.
We have spoken to a few of our premium partners and confirmed that they have been charged after we have terminated our SKU from displaying in the app.
We have sent a mass DM through our app to urge all premium users to check the status of the subscription in their Discord and cancel it immediately if it wasn't done so automatically.
Update #2 (30 May 2024)
Our manager noticed that the ticket was assigned only a week after the creation of the ticket.
A follow-up message has been sent on 2nd June in lieu of this assignment in the hopes of getting our issues recognized and settled as professionally as possibly.
A 30 day window was also issued before releasing the full ticket statement to the public and potentially submitting this issue to a legal team that would be of interest in attaining the funds back from Discord Inc. USA.
Update #3 (9 June 2024)
Till this day, the support tickets that we have opened has not been replied to.
Both our CEO and Manager's tickets are still unanswered to this day.
We have received numerous complaints from our partners that their refunds have yet to be processed and received, but do know that this issue is out of our hands as the funds are in the possession of Discord.
We are working and waiting tirelessly night and day to get a satisfactory result for this issue to be settled as soon as possible.
Rest assured partners, your issue is not being neglected. We are equally as mad as you trying to get a response out of them to settle this issue.
For previous premium subscribers on Discord
We will issue a refund update of your previous payments via DMs through our Discord app if your DMs are open.
A message was previously disseminated on 23rd May 2024 to all purchasing customers to cancel their subscriptions in lieu of Update #1 (21 May 2024).
Of a total of 25 subscribers, 4 unknown users did not receive this message. We are narrowing down the list of users who did not receive this disseminated message this month (June).
Update #4 (10-13 June 2024)
We received a text regarding a payout occurring on 10th June, and we logged into our Stripe dashboard (for Discord Developers) to confirm this. Status Check on 10 June 2024 : Pending Payout
Status Check on 12 June 2024 : Complete
We have fully received the payout on 12 June 2024 for users who purchased our Premium SKU on Discord from launch (January - May) and a view of our analytics confirmed there are no more recurring subscriptions on our Premium SKU on Discord.
Refund Policy for purchasers only until 1 September 2024
In lieu of this payout, we will only be refunding users who were double charged during the following period when we transited to Patreon and users are still subscribed on Discord.
We are still processing the list of users who are affected and we will be reaching out to you accordingly via Discord through our app DM or by AuthenticateMe Management. Until 1st September 2024, if you were double charged and we did not reach out to you, please join our Support Server, open a ticket and provide the following.
Discord Invoice for your Premium Subscription to the application (May - June )
Patreon Invoice (May - June)
All details in the invoices must be unredacted for us to confirm the validity of your purchase to process your refund.
We have already reached out to several premium users in our Support Server who have their refunds already being processed by Patreon. If you have already received our notice in our Discord server, please ignore this notice.
Final Conclusion (17 June 2024)
We have been through a lot of emotions during this period, and we have received criticism where it is due from a few of our patrons regarding this. It is also important for us to disclose that we did not warrant for this, especially in Discord's policies supposedly stating each payout will be disbursed 45 days after each calendar month and our funds were withheld without notice for nearly 5 calendar months.
We are disappointed with Discord's responses to our incident, especially the lack of transparency and clarity of information when it is due. As for our support tickets, we decided to completely abandon them as it is due to the long wait for a response that probably would never be constructive in guiding us to the right path.
Since we have moved away from Discord to Patreon for our premium subscriptions, you have our promise that issues like these will not occur again and we strive to deliver the best service we can to you as our purchasing partner.
We are still running on crisis mode to lookout for any potential issues in the next 14 days, before we can operate back to normal like before. As of the last 48 hours, all pre-existing issues regarding payments and subscriptions have been settled and verified to prevent such an issue from happening again.
Once again, if you were a premium user and were affected by this incident- we sincerely apologize for not delivering up to the standards that you expected for, and we would like to hear from you whenever you have any feedback for us.
Best Regards,
AuthenticateMe
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