Netgear Armor and Parental Controls Subscription Expired 7 and 9 months early
I recently setup an MR60 system early this year and decided to test both the Armor and Parental Controls premium features after the initial installation. I did not get to experience enough of their feature set after setup, and decided to extend my service with an annual subscription. Parental Control worked well over the summer to manage internet access on applicable devices and the BitDefender portion of Armor proved reasonable, though the network intelligence was always excruciatingly slow to load (like 2-5 minutes, I'd have to tap to keep my phone awake twice before the screen would load the first time and I never usually have to wait more than a second for anything on the internet to load, so it's a noticeably awful experience there).
Things have been "working" until this past Thursday, when the MR60 interface reported that both subscriptions were suddenly expired. Attempting to achieve support for this problem has unearthed a whole slew of issues in Netgear's support system. The structure of the support system very much makes this feel like a consumer rug-pull, turn and burn with no actual concern about product quality, abandoning paying customers to their own support devices just a few months into their annual contracts.
Without any change to the system by me or my household, 3 days ago, my system decided that both my annual (12 month) subscriptions were expired roughly 2 and 4 months (April and June) into their subscription periods. I have the receipts in my inbox, and I have the transactions on my credit card, but Netgear no longer seems to acknowledge these transactions exist, and now prompts me to "unlock premium features" again, with a brand new subscription.
Also, due to this missing subscription, all support options are unavailable, very clearly stating that support ended at 90-days after hardware product acquisition and no direct support options are available to non-premium members of the Armor and Parental Control services. I have basically lost the remainder of my subscription and Netgear has locked me out of any meaningful support options for my purchased products. At this point, as I see it, I can only start a refund/chargeback through my credit card company and enlist support here in the forums now in hopes to bring light to this error and poor support experience in these circumstances.
There is also the phone option, but I don't have any idea how much of my day I need to allot for that to be viable, I'm employed and have other daily responsibilities than debugging Netgear's systems. My last call with them also drove home the idea that if I didn't have a PAID support contract for a hardware device, their phone support would only be available for a fee. Since Netgear has never yet demonstrated to me they can manage financial transactions or subscriptions properly, I have no inclination to subscribe to enhanced support, or pay additional fees, for fear that money would also simply disappear as my subscriptions for Armor and Parental Control now have.
I've lost all confidence in, and given up on Netgear Armor and Parental Control as a product, and will absolutely not recommend Netgear in the future. I am looking for information how to contact support (without an associated fee) to discuss this error and possibly get a pro-rated refund for the remainder of my service subscriptions. If anyone can alert me to options I can pursue here, it would be appreciated. Thanks!
Re: Netgear Armor and Parental Controls Subscription Expired 7 and 9 months early
No, I just gave up! I bypassed the product as a Wireless AP only and gave up until I replaced the hardware with something else, luckily this wasn't my only option. I keep getting notifications from Netgear every month or so that I need to renew my subscription before it expires, even though there should still be MONTHS left.
The whole experience was so comical that it really hammered home that Netgear isn't paying attention to their products any more, so why should I expect them to pay attention to the security of their routers and services? It really made me question if the data they provided was real, or if they were injecting attacks to make their product feel more valuable, I've certainly seen no increase or disruption in services despite supposedly being under attack 40 times a day before their log stopped recording information. Neither product appears to be directly from Netgear, so enlisting their involvement was only netting Netgear some extra cash with little to no work other than poorly constructing an interface to interact with said services, and that appears to be a sluggish, mostly broken psuedo-iframe experience. Unfortunately, seems like an instance of one brand name being used to shovel another weaker brand into acceptance and compromising the overall product as a whole. After this experience, it demonstrated Netgear has zero follow-through, in particular with paid 3rd party associations, so it's little more than box-art and a checkbox rather than a valuable service you should consider to protect your valuable assets.
