Can't downgrade or shut down Pro. Is Vercel now a ransomeware?

Help
1

On 5/25, I tried to shut down my Pro team (Team A).

First, I clicked the downgrade button, but Vercel said I already had another free Hobby plan team (Team B), so all projects in Team B would be deleted. Uh, no thanks. I just wanted to downgrade and consolidate my projects, not lose my data.

So I transferred all the projects from the Pro team to another team, then tried downgrading again. Guess what? Vercel still insisted on deleting Team B’s data, even though Team A was now completely empty.

So I thought, fine, I’ll just delete Team A directly.

Nope. Not allowed.

Because Team A had a Neon integration (which I don’t even remember installing. I thought I was using Vercel’s built-in Postgres two years ago - apparently they spun it out as a separate product since then). To delete Team A, I had to remove the Neon integration first.

But I couldn’t remove the Neon integration, because to do that, I first had to remove all its products. But I couldn’t transfer the database. Even though the docs said I should see a “transfer” option in the settings, it just wasn’t there.

So, in short: I can’t transfer the database, so I can’t remove the Neon integration, so I can’t delete Team A, which is now just an empty Pro team. My only option is to delete the database.

So my questions are simple:

  1. How do I transfer the database to another team (Team A) and keep all the data?
  2. How to downgrade or close Team B?
    (Although the amount is small but in this case a refund is needed.)

Then on 5/27, a new billing cycle started, and Vercel charged me for another month. I submitted a support ticket on the day I found the problem (5/25), and still haven’t heard back (not surprising). It makes me wonder: is this Vercel’s business model? Slow support to trap you into paying another month… and another?

During the past 2 years of using Vercel, my conclusion is: Vercel is basically a scam run through bugs and dark design patterns. On top of the hidden pricing, surprise invoices, terrible support, and serious downtime (yes, I’ve experienced all of these), now Vercel is charging people by making it impossible to delete an account. Vercel is just a different form of ransomware.

I strongly recommend everyone to stay away from Vercel. Spend a bit of time on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or Cloudflare. The UI may be a bit more complex, but at least they won’t lock your account and extort you.

5

Hi @yujiahuang, I’m sorry to hear that you faced these issues. Let me talk to our team to see what happened here.

7

Hi @yujiahuang, I think the best course of action would be to:

  1. Go to Neon and take a pg_dump of your current database.
  2. Delete the database and then remove the integration from Vercel. You should be able to downgrade after this.
  3. Create a new Neon project, directly from Neon, and do a pg_restore.
  4. Put back the required environment variables from the new Neon database in your project.

I found this documentation on Neon’s website to help with these steps: Migrate data from Postgres with pg_dump and pg_restore - Neon Docs

1 Like
8

Thanks for the reply. I eventually downgraded the team by transferring all other projects to the Pro team, then deleted the Hobby team. It’s a weird workaround, but it worked.

But how can I close the open invoice (the extra month charge)? There seems to be a note saying I should contact sales.

1 Like
9

Hi Yuji, I’m glad you got it working. I’d recommend opening a case from https://vercel.com/help for the refund (if you haven’t already). They are best equipped to handle such cases. Have a a great day.

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I’ve opened a case but still no reply. Vercel keeps sending me emails threatening “Shutdown Coming Soon”.

11

The cases were weirdly merged to one in the dashboard. I just opened another one: Case number #541219

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