Sander first of all, I think this is a very well-written comment. I'm also realistic, offering the old legacy memberships the features for free will not make bunq more sustainable (as many others also realise). There are quite some costs involved with keeping these bank accounts open (compliance costs, processing payments, etc.). There had to be a moment that this was going to end, to make bunq sustainable and help it grow. So your two suggestions to offer Premium for free to old users is not feasible in my opinion.
Offering Premium at a discount is basically what's happening now, although limited to three months. Offering bunq Premium at a different pricing model will only complicate the already very complex billing logic that's behind the scenes, and bunq claims that they wanted to innovate and were blocked by having to support all these old memberships in the backend, so introducing new billing logic for legacy memberships seems like flushing away scarce developer time. I do think that the original promise to allow users to use services until their cards expire should be held. This promise can still be read on multiple places on the forum and was communicated clearly. Now, I would have much less of a problem with this change if it were communicated properly and timed much better. To me it seems unnecessary to move up the total deprecation/cancelation of these legacy plans while all old cards would expire anyway in roughly a year. bunq is building new features at quite a high pace,.. maybe they would've launched thé feature that would've convinced former More users to stay, but now that killer argument has to be there within three months, people are already looking to switch now. Free / Promo I can see being deprecated if the running costs became too high or something, but I would've appreciated an honest message about that rather than the tree stuff. That's at least what I imagine when a company calls itself transparent.
I did like the "Math behind the CO2 claim" topic by the way, that was something I would expect, whether I then agree with it is a second, but at least I can see that it is not just a total non-sense claim, there is thought behind it. In my opinion, Free / Promo should have gotten the notice that Terms would change (with the prior written/mailed notice of 60(?) days) and no harm would be done, offering three months Premium for the same price as an option would then be a new offer to compensate for the cancellation. Having customers to explicitly cancel to avoid being billed is not the right way I think, I think the user explicitly has to agree to staying on the paid plan. Moving them automatically to the new plan so they can test out the new features, sure! But at the end of the three months then why not show a small popup asking for confirmation whether the user wants to keep using Premium now that (s)he experienced it?
Oh well, I see some improvements being made after the chaos of the past days, that's positive. I still somewhat hope they will also find a way to make up to former More users. And a proper email explaining the sudden change for Free/Promo users would also be much appreciated by many I think. I think that would've helped, but who am I anyway, I'm no CEO of a bank or anything, no marketing expert, just a (maybe bit more than) average user of bunq. 🙂