Domestika - warning

tegmim

I don't know if other people will be aware, but Domestika have been attracting a lot of very negative feedback on TrustPilot and it seems that there are about 12,000 people who - like me - signed up for a "free trial" of the "Plus" subscription only to be charged $100 or more a few weeks later for an annual subscription, without warning or notification or the right to have a cooling off period, and supposedly with terms that don't permit a refund after this money is taken. This seems to have been a change made to their revenue model just over a year ago.

In my case I looked at Domestika in December and thought there might be good content - I like crafts and I have two teenagers who are fairly artistic and doing related GCSEs. There are courses about design, illustration, crafts, photo-editing software, etc, so I thought I'd try the free trial. That showed me a lot of their content is in Spanish, with very poor quality subtitles that make the narration make little sense and obscure the techniques being demonstrated. So I decided against subscribing, and used the chat function to inform them I wanted to remove my payment details. They told me that you can't do that, and I said I felt the information on the site was misleading and I wanted to close my account. I thought that was the end of it.

Today I read that loads of people feel like this is a scam, and have been charged when they did not sign up, so I checked my Paypal history and sure enough, $105 was debited by Domestika in January without notification, and after I told them clearly I wanted to leave and remove my payment details. It appears to be too late to mark this transaction as unauthorised with paypal.

So, only enter payment details if you are sure you want to pay for an annual membership, as a lot of people have found you can't opt out after the free trial.

Note: Some people believe the change from pay-per-course to hidden subscription fees might be a money grab because they are in financial difficulty, but (when I checked sites about their financial status, and supposed $1billion valuation) I can see over $100million of investment, which should have given them loads of runway for such a small operation, with what I assume is content created by individual tutors (who I guess get a cut of their course fees).

Also, even if you are still tempted to use them beware that very few courses are in English, and the subtitles are very poor.

I watched a bit of a course again last night to check whether the subtitles had improved or the promised English dubbing had happened, and found the same terrible quality content. I picked an introduction to pottery techniques course, and watched very very basic content where they referred to clay as "mud", slip as "pasta" or "glue", firing as "baking", slab forming as "plate making", coil technique as "churro technique" and "churritos", once-fired biscuit clay as "cake", glaze as "enamel" and sometimes as "nail polish". So you end up being told to use the pasta mud to fix the churros before baking, when you can put nailpolish on the cake - and to add insult to injury the subtitles almost entirely obscure the actual item she is showing you how to make or using as a reference.

I've now blocked further payments to Domestika from Paypal. But I do feel annoyed they took $105 without permission and after I clearly indicated I wanted to leave and remove my payment details.

Emmia

You're using $ - but this is a UK site. 

Is Domestika a US based service/company? I've never heard of it

400ixl

Yes it is a US site domestika.org based out of Berkerly California. So US rules apply not UK, so no cooling off period etc.

On their home page they are clear it is a subscription based service that you can cancel in the first 30 days otherwise you are committing to a 12 month plan.

"After your 30-day trial period you will be subscribed to the annual plan, $11.92/month (One payment of $142.99 CAD)."

tegmim

400ixl said:

Yes it is a US site domestika.org based out of Berkerly California. So US rules apply not UK, so no cooling off period etc.

On their home page they are clear it is a subscription based service that you can cancel in the first 30 days otherwise you are committing to a 12 month plan.

"After your 30-day trial period you will be subscribed to the annual plan, $11.92/month (One payment of $142.99 CAD)."

I'm British, and so are many of the people who have been scammed. They have a UK limited company to try to grow the market here, but Domestika took the £89 (or various other amounts as the price rose) in USD - again, no indication that would be the case for any payment. If you look up the history, it was a south American start-up but the investment pulled the HQ to California.

You quote what it says now about the annual plan, but that wasn't what it said at the time I subscribed, just lots of free trial info. We aren't idiots, and there wouldn't be 12,000 people complaining if it was clear. Read the reviews on TrustPilot, for example, there are 44 pages of unhappy people since the changes towards the end of last year.

Brie

400ixl said:

Yes it is a US site domestika.org based out of Berkerly California. So US rules apply not UK, so no cooling off period etc.

On their home page they are clear it is a subscription based service that you can cancel in the first 30 days otherwise you are committing to a 12 month plan.

"After your 30-day trial period you will be subscribed to the annual plan, $11.92/month (One payment of $142.99 CAD)."

Odd too that it's a US company but apparently the payments are in Canadian dollars not American.

400ixl

tegmim said:

You quote what it says now about the annual plan, but that wasn't what it said at the time I subscribed, just lots of free trial info. We aren't idiots, and there wouldn't be 12,000 people complaining if it was clear. Read the reviews on TrustPilot, for example, there are 44 pages of unhappy people since the changes towards the end of last year.

We can only go on what it says now as to whether anyone engaging with them today would be aware of the shift to an annual subscription if not cancelled within 30 days. You are warning people about the subscription being underhand, as of today it isn't, it is clearly identified.

Sorry that you and others engaged at a time where it would appear they did not make this clear, and completely understand your frustration.

Looking back at the site on the way back archive they were certainly less clear, you have to go and read the T&C's themselves to see the information about subscriptions becoming annual after 30 days. It was in there though, so doesn't look like a get out method for people who didn't see it.

Thank you for the clarity on the historical issue which they have at least addressed. Doesn't help the people like you who signed up prior to that though unfortunately.

How did you pay? If by credit card have you tried a charge back to see if they contest it?

As for the UK company, have you got a link? The only one I could find on companies house is a Domestika Limited which appears to be a one man band with very little in the way of revenue and I couldn't find a link to the US org. Would be interesting to look if there is another company.

Either way, the site you subscribed with has clear T&C's that the legal jurisdiction is New York US, and there is no 14 day cooling off period. Although if you cancelled within 30 days it should not have turned into an annual subscription. If that was the case and you have evidence I would definitely be getting my bank involved. 

Hopefully the change to the site will stop more people not being aware and ending up in the same position.

400ixl

Brie said:

400ixl said:

Yes it is a US site domestika.org based out of Berkerly California. So US rules apply not UK, so no cooling off period etc.

On their home page they are clear it is a subscription based service that you can cancel in the first 30 days otherwise you are committing to a 12 month plan.

"After your 30-day trial period you will be subscribed to the annual plan, $11.92/month (One payment of $142.99 CAD)."

Odd too that it's a US company but apparently the payments are in Canadian dollars not American.

Yes, found that odd. Was expecting to find it was a Canadian company. Potentially some tax dodge by taking payments through Canada, but purely guessing on my part.

tegmim

The amount shown on my Domestika account is in £, but the amount taken was in $. There are reddit threads, facebook groups, petitions and all sorts, all full of thousands of people who cancelled before the annual subscription was taken.

P.S. Apologies if I got it wrong about the UK company, I had read about their push to get sales into the UK on an investment blog. They were founded in Madrid. Also, their 2022 article in TechCrunch when they became a unicorn company says "These courses are always sold à la carte, not on a monthly subscription." So it is very clearly a new direction of travel, and the ratio of negative reviews changed hugely downhill about twelve months ago.

TanP

It looks like any subscription-based service these days is a variation of this scam. Requires a subscription or charges a small fee for trial to get your card details and then they can syphon money as they wish. I was scammed by a popular course platform. I'm not consistent with courses so I cancelled online after a couple of months. Over a year later I found out they've been pinching me 25GBP each month. Their support was a Nigerian scammer wasting my time a few rimes and they never refunded. He was lying that I reactivated my subscription
BEWARE- most online offerings are there to fish for your bank card details. Even things like health foods and products make it easy to subscribe and very difficult to stop the payments.
Hence I don't subscribe anymore or try offerings if they're a trial ones.
I'm sure you can get plenty of FREE youtube vids on anything covered by Domestika.
This issue should be spoken of more by MSE