David W.

Today I woke up to a $110 USD charge for a full year's subscription to World Anvil. I had previously subscribed a year ago, and while the service itself was great, I was shocked when I was hit with the charge, as I had previously cancelled my subscription with the company on the same day I did my one-year subscription. I always do this as a best practice with all services specifically to avoid situations like this, and have not had an issue with any other service I used along side it (D&D Beyond, Roll20, etc).

I hadn't used the service in several months so I immediately contacted World Anvil and told them about the issue. I didn't think this would be a large deal as I had already cancelled previously and contacted them within an hour or two of the charge. I was told that unless I can produce an email they had allegedly previously sent to me showing that I had cancelled the services a year ago, they would not reimburse the charge, even though their website clearly shows my account in the cancelled status.

I checked my emails and did not have a cancellation email from them from a year ago. Apparently the email is the only thing they will accept, regardless of account status.

Because I brought up this issue with them, as punishment in retaliation they have now disabled my subscription and are telling me to delete my account, but they are not reimbursing the money they charged today. I've lost access to all of the content I had previously created as well with my group. I've now paid $110 USD for service I cannot even use for the year I just "paid" for, lost hundreds of hours of content created, and World Anvil still holds my payment information (they allegedly cannot delete my card info), and for all I know will do the same thing to me again a year from now.

I brought up that they do not provide any warning about the significant charges and had I gotten a warning about the upcoming charge this would (or should) not have been a problem as I could have contacted them earlier about the error in their system. Their response was "we don't have to provide a warning as we're in the EU and so we don't". This is convenient for them, since they can now say that they've "not gotten written notification" about a cancellation and will charge users anyways, without recourse.

This is apparently a fairly common issue with the company. You can check their responses to similar issues on their Reddit account, where they openly admit to deleting user's accounts that have run into this issue. Had I known about it ahead of time I would have only subscribed on a month-to-month basis to begin with (or not subscribed at all).