Update 2: SurveyMonkey has caved under the pressure of hundreds of page hits, shares, and retweets of this blog post, and granted me a full refund and a 6-month complimentary subscription.

In zoos, I’ve seen monkeys fornicate and masturbate in public, eat their own vomit, and even dine without the benefit of cutlery–or clean hands. The animals’ shamelessness, however, is nothing compared to that of SurveyMonkey.

In my previous blog post, I reported how SurveyMonkey completed my purchase of a subscription priced at 39 euros throughout by charging my credit card 99 euros, a fraud to the tune of 60 euros. My correspondence with their customer service has so far lead to neither an acknowledgement of error nor an apology nor a refund.

However, in a weird new development, they seem to have taken steps to ensure that this issue does not occur in the future. Their approach, however, is so bizarre that it deserves a follow-up blog post. Instead of refunding me my 60 euros, they’ve decided to hike up the price for the monthly plan to 99. What’s so bizarre about it is that they’ve done this while keeping the plan benefits the same.

Their 39/month Standard plan, the one I was charged 99 for, was originally the most convenient, especially for single-use customers like myself. They also offered a 36/month Advantage plan, but for that subscription, the long list of addtional features was balanced by the fact that it required customers to pay by the year. So: Standard, slightly more expensive, but billed monthly, with the only downside of less features; or Advantage, slightly cheaper, but billed annually, with the upside of much more features.

The sudden price hike for the Standard plan did not entail any changes in feature sets. So now the Standard plan is bizarrely expensive, and still very limited in terms of features.

It seems like a lot of effort to avoid admitting that I’m right…