Newsblur cancelled your automatic payments

question
#1

My Newsblur Premium account generally renews around the 29th December each year and this duly happened again this year via the usual Paypal automatic payment mechanism. Shortly after the payment notification from PayPal arrived, I received an additional notification from PayPal indicating Newsblur had cancelled my automatic payments.

I can see in my account page that my Newsblur Premium is active until 29th December 2021 so that’s all good but I can’t see a cause for the automatic payment cancellation.

I also can’t see anywhere that states what the annual payment should be. The payment that just went through was for USD $24 which has been the case for previous years so I’m wondering if this signifies a price change has occurred or is going to occur or whether something has just gone wrong somewhere and the automatic payment cancellation is an error.

If anyone has experienced the same or knows the cause I’d be grateful to understand what’s happened. Additionally, if the subscription price has increased and this year’s fee should have been higher, I’d be happy to pay the difference if guidance can be provided on how to make that happen.

Thanks in advance for any help/thoughts/advice offered.

#2

Thank you for taking the time to write this. To be honest, I don’t know why it was canceled but NewsBlur didn’t do it automatically. More likely a card expired and that was enough for Paypal to cancel the subscription. You can renew but it will be at the $36 rate. All accounts will eventually move to this new sustainable rate. Thanks for going premium!

#3

I appreciate the check but can confirm it was nothing on the PayPal side that I or anyone from PayPal can detect. No cards expired, nothing in my account would have / should have triggered it according to my enquiries to PP customer support and my own investigations.

I’ve had other services send similar messages in the past but only when they were (say) closing down and therefore wanted to make sure they were no longer taking money for a service they weren’t going to be providing. (Which actually gave me a moment of panic to be honest… my first thoughts were "oh no, don’t tell me Newsblur is shuttering!)

I’m therefore inclined to think something in the Newsblur side was responsible for the cancellation of payments even if it was not an automated thing.

Regardless, hopefully all will go smoothly when I renew at the end of this year!

#4

Yeah another user just mentioned the same thing happening. I don’t know why it happened and it looks like it’s not happening all that often. The only time NewsBlur does it is when a user clicks on the Cancel Subscription button. That’ll do it, but nothing automated will cancel a subscription.

#5

I just attempted to setup the subscription with PayPal again just to deal with it while it’s on my radar and it looks to have been successful… possibly too successful… it may have actually charged me now on 5th Jan 2021 even though I renewed on 29 Dec 2020… TBC on that.

But it has renewed the sub at the $36 rate which clearly is where it should have been - I’m not clear on whether the previous cancelled sub that caused this thread which was at $24 was an error or a kindly allowance to those with long-standing subs but either way, Newsblur is worth paying the going rate for to me… within reason before you develop ‘champagne tastes!’ perhaps! :rofl:

Right - thanks again. Hopefully this will now be sorted.

#6

This just happened to me as well. I changed the payment method of my Newsblur PayPal subscription on PayPal’s side (wanted to use a different card) and when I did so, I instantly got an email saying Newsblur had cancelled my subscription.

My guess is changing the payment method of a subscription on PayPal (which is the only thing you can do as a user, besides cancelling it) sends a IPN with type of subscr_modify. I may be off base here, but from a cursory glance, Newsblur code doesn’t seem to check for txn_type of the incoming IPN, so when it gets the webhook about the subscription modification from PayPal, it eventually ends up here, and then it’ll cancel the most recent subscription it has on record, thinking it just got a new one (which it didn’t, the latest just got modified).

In this case, I was still on a legacy $12 subscription, so I sure got schooled by that click, but after getting a discount subscription for so long, I can’t really complain!

1 Like
#7

@samuelclay Do you want me to raise a Github issue?

#8

I have now fixed the bug that caused PayPal subscriptions to be cancelled inadvertently. Thanks for reporting this!