A sales email arrived on 2 September for a subscription I cancelled three weeks earlier. The same inbox has owed me twenty-four dollars and fifty cents since 9 August. Both are handled by the same company, and one of them moves.

The email that arrived on 2 September

At 11:05 on the morning of 2 September an email landed offering 33% off the first three months, three months of an AI product billed as a $300 value, and three months of a prospecting tool. Forty-eight hours only. To accept, reply with two words.

It came from GoHighLevel. I cancelled the trial on 12 August and hold two confirmations from that day saying so — one titled Your Agency Subscription has been cancelled, one confirming the same for the account number. That email says the trial “has ended” and that what I built “will go dark soon.” That is the language of an account expiring, not one that was closed on purpose three weeks earlier.

I did not reply. There is a specific reason.

Since 9 August I have been asking the same company for a refund of USD 24.50 (the trial charge of AUD 35.89, including the overseas fee). The request has a ticket number. It was acknowledged. On 12 August I was told it would be raised with the team. Since then: nothing. Not a decline, not a delay, not a holding line. Twenty-six days of silence on the only email where I was the one asking for something.

What the same inbox did in August

I started the trial on 3 August. On 7 August the card was charged. On 8 August I received a clear reply to my pricing questions: AI was priced per sub-account, Australian regulatory bundles were also per sub-account and could not be shared, and an Australian rate card never arrived despite two requests. I wrote about the decision that followed in Build Log #4 — I could not compute the cost of a single client, so I left.

On 9 August I asked for four things: the refund, written confirmation the trial would not convert, removal of the card, and release of a phone number. On 12 August I was told the cancellation could not be actioned from their side and was given the self-serve steps, along with the line please cancel it before it charges. I cancelled it myself. On 13 August I chased the remaining items with a deadline of 15 August. That deadline passed in silence. On 17 August I lodged a disputed-transaction report with the bank.

Every message went to the same address and was handled by the same role. When the subject was me continuing to pay, the response time was under a day. When the subject was them paying me back, the response time is now close to four weeks and counting.

The parts that are not a person

It would be easy, and wrong, to make this about one individual. The more useful observation is that the asymmetry was already built into the product.

Auto-recharge could not be switched off. There was no toggle — only fields for the amount and the threshold. The card could not be removed; the payment-methods screen offered Add new card and nothing else. Cancelling ran nine retention screens on the first attempt and eleven on the second, the later run having added a five-day sprint offer and a feedback form with no skip. Two of those screens claimed an extension and $50 in credits had been applied. Neither appeared.

The final gate was a password prompt warning that continuing would permanently forfeit wallet credits — $20 already paid. Once closed, the account redirected to an inactive page with no settings access, giving the reason as locked due to failed payment. There had been no failed payment. I had cancelled.

Because the account is closed and settings are unreachable, the card still cannot be removed. That email — offering to activate a paid plan immediately — is therefore pointed at a card I have no way to take back, and which is currently the subject of an open bank dispute.

Why “no human touch” is the wrong complaint

The usual complaint is that you cannot reach a person. That was not the experience here.

I reached a person. They had a name and a job title. They replied the next day on pricing. They replied again on how to cancel. They are presumably the same person whose name is on that offer, sent three weeks after the account closed. There was no shortage of human attention.

The attention only ever pointed one way. Every message that could end with me paying more was answered promptly. The one message that would end with money going back was acknowledged once and then absorbed. That is not an absence of humans. It is a company that has staffed, measured and incentivised one direction of its inbox and not the other. The same person can be fast in one direction and silent in the other without anything appearing broken.

Software companies publish response-time numbers. None of them separate the two directions. If they did, the gap would be the most interesting figure on the page.

This is also why the pattern keeps appearing at larger companies. In a small business the person who sold you the service often still sits close to the person who handles the refund or the exit. The whole relationship remains visible in both directions. At scale those functions usually split. The team that keeps someone paying is measured and resourced differently from the team that returns money or releases a card. The gap is not only headcount. It is which direction of attention the organisation has decided is worth the cost.

What I would measure before signing anything now

The $24.50 is not the point. What it actually cost was the afternoon spent walking eleven retention screens, the emails, the bank dispute, and the fact that a card still sits with a vendor I no longer use. Call it a day of time on a twenty-four dollar charge.

The rule I have taken from it is this: before signing up to anything, find out what leaving costs. Not the price — the exit.

• Can the card be removed without contacting anyone?
• Can auto-renewal be switched off, not merely reduced?
• How many screens sit between deciding to leave and having left?
• If you ask for money back, does anything happen?

Those four questions take ten minutes to answer during a trial, when the company is still attentive in your direction. Ask them then. You cannot ask them later — the whole point is that later, nobody replies.

I have not replied to that email, and I will not. But I did forward it to my bank.