Lingq is toxic: or, how to turn a fairly amicable departure into a fiery rage

This is a story about how i tried out a piece of software, decided it wasn’t for me, and tried to delete my account and move on with my life, as i have done a million times before. But this time, the software thought it knew better and, in true Doctor Seuss fashion, kept popping up again and again with something else to say, ultimately showing me that these people do not care about my autonomy, only about my money.

The software in question is lingq, which is a learning with texts tool for studying languages. Essentially the way this works is that the words in a piece of text are highlighted in different colours depending on how familiar you are with a word. The different pieces of software that work in this way may also have functionality to tell you which words occur in your text more frequently, so you can prioritise learning them, and not waste time on words with a very low frequency.

It appears that lingq does not like the term learning with texts, because lingq was in fact the original piece of software that works in this way, and learning with texts is the name of a free and open source alternative. I prefer the term learning with texts, because it is slightly more descriptive, and considerably less ugly, than “lingq”.

The advantage of lingq over something like learning with texts is that lingq has lots of content already prepared, so you don’t have to waste time doing setup. Some of the content is made by the lingq company, but the majority is made by users, who see no compensation for their efforts. For me, that means that lingq’s business model is morally dubious, but i am not a lawyer and i suppose these people are willing participants in the scheme. But it does make some of lingq’s founder’s claims that alternative software that works in a similar way is stealing their idea a little laughable to me.

Anyway, i paid for a month of lingq. This was because it seemed to have the best intersection of good chinese support and ease of use of all the similar software i saw. It makes sense, as the company founder seems into learning the chinese languages too. After using it for a while, i decided that the amount of jank in the software, and the amount of extra features that interfered with the core premise but were made hard to ignore, was too much for me, and i wanted out.

That’s when i discovered that lingq is the worst company i’ve ever had the pleasure of trying to stop using.

How to delete an account? Before you can do that, you have to first downgrade. This is a slight annoyance, and i prefer websites that automatically cancel any recurring payments as part of the deletion process, but it’s common enough that this is two separate steps that i don’t want to severely criticise lingq here. But in this case it was a foreshadowing of what’s to come.

Because you cannot simply click a button and downgrade: what happens when you click the downgrade button? You are redirected to a new page asking if i’m sure i want to. I am sure, so i click to tell lingq that i am sure. That should do it.

Lingq directs me to a second page. If i choose to stay around, i get a 50% discount off the membership fee for the next three months. But i don’t want to keep paying them, so i click the downgrade button again, ignoring this desperate last attempt to get some more of my money, and feel relieved that finally i will be able to downgrade.

Lingq directs me to a third page. This time, i am told that for only 199$, i can use lingq for life. The page doesn’t make it clear that this means the life of lingq, not my life, but maybe they are planning to stick around. Either way, this desperation on top of my existing desire to simply downgrade does not make me want to give them more money, and i always find it a bit uncomfortable when companies are more willing to offer discounts to people who have expressed a desire to stop giving them money than those loyal customers who are already sticking around. Luckily at the bottom of the page i can again tell dear lingq that i don’t want to pay them, so can i please finally downgrade?

Lingq directs me to a fourth page, this time advertising their vacation plan which costs two dollars per month. Until this point, i hadn’t realised that this was a thing: on every other site where i’ve stopped paying a subscription, i get put into a limited access mode and can then access the full product again once i restart payments. But not lingq: if i don’t pay, instead of keeping my account in a dormant state, everything is deleted. If i want to keep my data, i have to keep paying them every month.

I understand that storing data isn’t free, but given that the core of the lingq experience requires only a list of words that i have marked as know or unknown and that that wordlist that i downloaded earlier takes up less than ten kilobytes of space on disk, i don’t think it’s unreasonable for that to be kept around. If they decided to delete the data from any of their other half-baked, tacked on features like the flashcards, i wouldn’t mind so much, because not doing flashcards for a long period of time kind of lowers the effectiveness anyway, but that they don’t save a tiny word list for if i ever want to keep paying genuinely shocked me. Maybe i’m naive. But i just want to downgrade.

Lingq directs me to a fith page, telling me i’ve been downgraded, and i start breathing again. This page has a dialogue box asking why, and no way to skip or close it, except for closing the tab. So i do. I am left feeling embarrassed that i ever paid for a month to begin with. It feels like they almost know their product is mediocre and are doing anything they can to squeeze money out of me. The sequence has a few other red flags for me.

First, i don’t like off by one pricing. I feel like it doesn’t respect the customer at all. Just say it’s two hundred. But this isn’t unique to lingq, it just seems to be how pricing works these days.

Second, why are you trying to give me discounts when i say i don’t want the service? Why would i give you two hundred dollars when i don’t want to give you anything? Like i said already, i really don’t like services that reward disloyal customers. I don’t like the concept of a disloyal customer, but i think that’s the best way to describe it. But you should be rewarding customers who like and use and pay for your product with the better value to make them feel it’s worth it, i think, in my vague view of marketing. I don’t think i’ve ever seen fifty percent off anywhere else on the site, and not a buy for life offer. These are exclusively given to people who don’t want to use the service anymore.

Third, any lifetime access promises without either (a) an asterisk saying lifetime of the company, not the customer, or (b) actually letting me run the software or get the mp3s or whatever on my own device off a third party server, mean nothing to me.

Update 2025-11-28: out of the blue, i got two more spam emails from them, today and on the 25th. I’ve put them in spam, as nothing else seems to work. I thought i’d deleted my account, but i can still go through the reset password flow, before being told my account is inactive. This concerns me, as they are clearly still holding some information about me.