Beware Avast Users

Richard_Butcher

BEWARE AVAST USERS.
If you have subscribed AND have auto renew set, they will bill you £39.99 on renewal without notifying you of the renewal. This product is available for £19.99 on manual renew. It’s simple to fix, just log into your account and disable auto renew, they'll let you know when it’s about to expire and you'll be directed to the lower price renewal.
Also, beware that their customer service is nothing short of unresponsive, belligerent and downright rude!
If, like me, you have succumbed to their marketing and signed up for their 'CleanUp' product, you must also have Avast antivirus installed, it does work with the free version but this prevents you from changing antivirus providers if your subscriptions should overlap. Having spoken to a number of users on other forums, they seem to target customers with secondary products that rely on the main antivirus package about 6 months into your subscription, clever little blighters.
I have had no problems with the antivirus package, it seems to work well but after my customer service experience and their dubious marketing techniques I'd like to find a provider with better support and don’t try to rip customers off on renewal.

agrinnall

The simple answer is not to subscribe in the first place, the free product is generally adequate, and not fall for the marketing of additional products of dubious value.

Richard_Butcher

Thanks for your advice Agrinnall, I'll try not to be so stupid and gullible in the future.

forgotmyname

I have a habit of keeping old install files for AV etc. It was amusing to watch the file sizes increase with each update and software getting more and more bloatware to stay ahead of the competition.

An Antivirus was a sub 6MB install. None of this nonsense of having to download it from CNET who tried to install their own ad ridden installer as well as the now 215MB? AV