Pausing membership and billing

Hi

I can’t get a straight or clear answer from Zwift customer service on this, so hopefully someone here can.

Assume I resume my membership on July 15. I pay monthly so my next bill will be August 15.

At the end of July on July 29 I go on vacation for 3 weeks (from July 29 to August 19) so decide to pause my membership for 3 weeks.

According to the conflicting information I’m getting from customer service, while I would not get billed while on pause, my billing date does not change and I would get billed upon resuming my membership after the pause.

So I resume riding on August 19 (3 weeks later) and will receive the August 15 bill on August 19, and on September 15 I get billed again as per the regular billing cycle.

So from July 15 to August 15 I paid 1 month for 2 weeks of riding, and from August 15 to September 15 I paid one month for slightly less than 4 weeks of riding since I resumed riding on August 19.

So I financially lose out. How can this be right or did I miss anything?

Thanks for any insight.

Your 3-week pause would start first at the end of the billing period so from if you set up one in late July, it will run from Aug 15 to Sept 5 or so. If you want the pause to be longer and resume riding on Aug 19, you’ll have to start it on Jul 15. (The cancel option is probably easier, it doesn’t tie you to 7-day increments and that way you can end the pause when you actually want to use Zwift.)

I don’t know how it works, but are you really only trying to pause for 3 weeks? What’s that cost, like $12?

It’s the principle of the thing. Pausing in my mind saved me money when I was not using it, which is fair to both parties.

After I started asking questions I realized it’s the opposite, I actually pay more when I pause. That’s not right and the company is taking advantage of those who don’t ask questions or don’t understand how their pause function works.

I’m hoping to effect change so that pausing is fair. Surely if they can develop a platform as complex as Zwift, they can fix a simple accounting issue unless they don’t want to. Or care.

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Thanks for your input Anna.

You may be right but what you describe means I would not have access to Zwift from Aug 15 to Sept 5, when in all that time frame, there are just 4 days from Aug 15 to 19 that I would not wish to ride.

In my example, there does not appear to be a way to not ride for 3 weeks from July 29 to August 19 without having to pay for at least some of those days.

Hasn’t anyone noticed the issue with pause before?

I presume it is working as designed (and not exactly unique, it’s not like you can pause/cancel for instance any streaming service except to the end of a subscription period either), revenue is revenue…

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From my understanding, as someone who has suspended indefinitely, is that you pay as usual regardless of when you pause (i.e., you’re paying a month in advance, regardless of how often you use it) but that your billing date would change to whenever you picked it up again.

So, unless you stop before 15 July, you pay until 15 August. But, afterwards, you pay from whenever you start (19 August or whenever).

As for the criticism of why bother pausing for only a few weeks, they all add up: with average holidays and annual leave, you could plan it and only pay 10 months for the year… which is the type of plan for which we’ve been shouting since Watopia was launched.

Sad to hear that :sob: , I miss the Masters weekender Sunday race.