Academia Reviews 810

Academia.edu serves as a place where researchers can make their publications publicly available. They have charged a subscription fee of $99 annually for at least the last decade. With no notice to users this year, they increased their subscription to $299 per year. This is a 200% increase to users without any sort of authorization. I immediately canceled my subscription and disputed the charge. They will lose a lot of subscribers as this price hike hits users this year. The only reason I caught it was I saw the charge in my bank account. Again, they did not contact me in any way and simply tripled the charge. Very unprofessional and unethical. I won't do business with any company that treats its customers this way. Maybe they needed to increase subscription costs to continue to provide services, but the underhanded way they did it will drive users from the platform and cost them far more in the long run. Academics are generally not particularly wealthy people. Tripling the cost will definitely drive them to find other platforms.

Be very carefull in December 2023 I subscribed for a €. 5 offer for one Month subscription and before the ending I cancelled it. To my surprise on the 6th February 2025 they tool €. 247.76 from my paypal account, then I noticed that they had already took €. 169.00 for the renewal in 2024!!! This platform is a scam, I blocked the automatic payments and deleted the account.
From other complains I see that this is the norm, I did write to ACADEMIA immediately and this is their reply: "Thanks for contacting us regarding this Academia Premium payment. Unfortunately, we are not offering refunds for any Academia Premium renewal payments at this time, and we see that this payment falls outside our refund policy that we also describe in our terms of use in our "subscriptions" subsection." Therefore they comments to these complains will not fix anything!!!

Charges $500, I don’t want the service, they refuse to refund. I requested cancellation very shortly after an annual charge.

Similar to what many others have testified here, this is what happened to me:
Last year, I signed up for a premium subscription as part of a promotion at the time.
As usual, I immediately cancelled the auto-renewal after signing up. However, they reactivated it without my knowledge.
I NEVER received any notice and was charged an outrageously high price for something I DID NOT sign up for.
To make matters even worse, they FORGED a message in their reply thread, making it appear as if I admitted to forgetting to cancel the auto-renewal. This is not just an unethical business practice—it is the very definition of fraud.

With certainty I cancelled auto-renew some time ago. I had subscribed with a special reduced offer. A few days ago I watched a $299 charge pop up in my email. I contacted them IMMEDIATELY using the web form to let them know. I got a form letter more or less saying “too bad, jokes on you. Enjoy your subscription.” I wrote back this was outrageously unfair, nothing to enjoy here and then I opened a dispute with my credit card. For one thing, they don’t make it easy to cancel- room for error. They do clickbait by saying you were mentioned in a paper. Completely unscrupulous. Judging from reviews I am not alone in this. I wish there was a class action suit against them. UPDATE: to Academia.edu as per your reply. I AM NOT PAYING THIS CHARGE. Reporting your dishonest practices to Better Business Bureau and any other consumer outlet I can find to warn others. TRUSTPILOT reviewers please do the same.

Last January, I paid £69 for an annual subscription. A few days ago, they took a renewal fee of £334 from my bank account, with no notice. If it had been in the same ballpark as last year, or slightly more, I might have let it go, although I would have been disappointed not to receive a reminder. However, this price hike is disgusting, as is their failure to provide any advance warning. I have contacted them (ticket 772678), but so far not received a reply.

Academia.edu has kept my creedit card no and charged me without any permission or notice.I understood it almost immediately. This is ROBBERY. I asked my funds back and they are keeping telling me that "they dont offer refund"... Refund of a robbery !!

ACADEMIA PREMIUM IS A SCAM!!!
Unbeknownst to me, I apparently enrolled in Academy Premium in 2018. Since then — despite multiple attempts to cancel automatic payment — I’ve been charged $99 annually. Neither phone calls nor emails have resolved the situation. The realization that Academy Premium has fleeced me for nearly $1,000 is infuriating!
IT SHOULD NOT BE THIS DIFFICULT TO STOP AUTO PAYMENT!

Scam! I have had a free account for over a decade, but they have charged me hundreds of dollars for Premium over the past few years without me knowing! I was not aware that I was subscribed to Premium and have never used it. You will notice that their website is designed to make it *unreasonably difficult* to cancel, as well as to trick people into not finishing their cancellation process. **If you try to cancel, make sure the process is complete!!**

There really should be a class action lawsuit against this company. There are probably many students getting screwed who can’t afford it, which is truly wrong when college is already insanely costly. I see them in the replies on this page, offering a VERY limited refund, but offering only one refund and only if it is requested in the first 30 days is unacceptable, given the dirty methods they use to trick you into these payments, and how they bury their billing emails in other spammy emails, as others here have described. Nothing less than a full refund of every single payment they have charged to us will be acceptable.

I concur with everyone calling Academia.edu a disreputable company. Apparently they got the .edu URL before it was restricted to universities only, so that lends them the appearance of real credibility and integrity without actually having it. Warn your students and colleagues! Teach them instead to use other methods to promote their work, such as Google Scholar, ResearchGate, personal websites, social media, and good old fashioned networking at conferences.

I saw I my account would automatically renew but at a MUCH higher rate than in the past. I tried to log in to cancel. The site told me the login was suspicious, and subject to manual review. Nothing happened. Suddenly I found the charge against my bank account. I tried again to sign in. Same problem. There is no way to contact them, no way to log in, no way to cancel. And even if I were able to try to cancel, they refuse to refund an amount I didn't want to pay, but couldn't stop because their website won't let me in and no one will respond.
A total theft scam. Stay away from this organization.

I previously subscribed to a trial plan for $3 on Academia.edu. Initially, I found the website's resources outdated and did not use the service afterward. Later, I noticed multiple notifications about failed attempts to charge $99 to my account (likely because there weren’t sufficient funds at the time). Realizing that the website was attempting unauthorized charges, I proactively canceled the auto-renewal subscription.

However, on January 26th at 9:55 PM (Vietnam Time), my account was charged $99 without any clear reason. Upon checking, I found that Academia.edu had withdrawn $99 for a service I did not use. I had previously canceled the auto-renewal subscription, yet Academia.edu reactivated my subscription and processed the payment, seemingly to create a valid receipt.

Frankly speaking, this is blatant fraudulent behavior involving unauthorized access to my card to charge payments. This action is illegal, and I demand an immediate explanation and resolution.

I request a full refund of the $99 charged to my account and confirmation that my subscription has been permanently canceled. If I do not receive a satisfactory response, I will be forced to escalate this matter to my bank and consumer protection authorities.

I look forward to your prompt response.

I recently subscribed to Academia.edu's trial for £1 last month. Unfortunately, I didn't realize I had signed up for the premium yearly subscription. This morning, I was unexpectedly charged £82.
I am very disappointed with this experience and would like a refund for the yearly subscription. I did not intend to subscribe to the premium service for a full year and feel this charge is unfair.
I reached out to the support group but I am yet to receive a response. Here is my ticket ID 769246
Please address this issue promptly and refund my money. Thank you.

I have been charged for subscription , immediately started to contact them and nobody still my messages
This website is scam
Refund my money

I would give them zero stars if I could, same as others; they sent a message saying that the renewal was due, which I never received, and I got a 269.37 euro charge for improvements I do not see relevant. I contacted them the same day, and they refused to refund me. They are sociopaths, no doubt. Please, do yourself a favour and avoid that FRAUDELENT company, full of crap.

I have to echo the many negative reviews. They hiked their subscription charges to stratospheric levels and sent an update email only one week before the sting. The title didn’t alert me to the importance of the content (they send LOTS of unsolicited emails). Thoroughly disreputable behaviour from a company masquerading as an education provider. I feel foolish and very angry. Not surprisingly, they were completely indifferent to my pleas and I’ve just lost over £200 to what is self evidently a scam. PLEASE AVOID.

Stay away from this company! As many other users on this platform I got to deal with their ridiculous price raise. To be fair, they did send one e-mail 1 week before they took my money, announcing the price raise. However, they send you multiple e-mails per week, (which you don't actually need), which makes you miss an important update like this. I signed up at the end of 2023. In 2024 an annual subscription cost me €120. I practically did not use the platform that year. Out of the many e-mails they send, I probably clicked on 4 during the course of a whole year. Certainly not worth the €120/year subscription cost. I would however have continued to pay this fee, as I planned to use it a bit more in 2025. That was untill they decided to more than double their annual subscription fee to €265. I have now blocked automatic payments through PayPal, cancelled my subscription and contacted their support to give some kind of solution: a refund or a different kind of subscription tier. As many other users I got an e-mail back that they will not refund me, and that although I have already cancelled my subscription, (my account says I will not be charged again), I'm actually not yet fully unsubscribed to their service?
I do not understand this company! Are they doing a cashgrab before declaring a planned bankruptcy? If they had not acted this way, I probably would have stayed subscribed at €120/year for many years.

Ridiculous increase of subscription price without any prior notification or possibility to end subscription - stay away from it

This is a predatory, unethical commercial company. They increased their renewal price for the premium service without any warning. The increase was from £82 to £204 - a huge and completely unexpected rise. There were no emails or invoices about this payment, which was taken on a Sunday. What's more, when I went to check my email preferences, which were on the default setting, I saw that emails about 'premium payments' were unchecked, ensuring that users are not able to anticipate the recurring payment and challenge it or cancel before it has been taken - unless they opt-in to (who wouldn't do that? There shouldn't even be a check box, let alone it being unchecked by default!)

When I contacted them, they stated that any refunds are 'against their policy' - which is a bit like saying that their 'policy' is to steal from their members.

I was also very shocked by the callous approach of their customer service responses, which made no mention of the part of my message where I explained that I was on medical leave for cancer treatment.

I've come across a few useful journal articles from people I follow on this site, but the Premium service has never been useful to me. And the research pieces are nothing I couldn't find easily elsewhere with conventional bibliographic research.

Definitely do not sign up for Premium, and do not give them any payment details. Ideally, avoid the whole platform. It really is a nasty business.

Cancelled auto renew but they charged me $299 instead of $99 I had previously paid. Tried to just cancel the whole thing day after the charge but they have refused to refund the incorrectly charged $299. So I am being charged even though I had no use of the system and for triple the price with no advance notice. This is outrageous and I have filed a dispute with my credit card company.

Their response is further outraging. They know I only paid the $99 for one year and tried repeatedly to cancel auto renew and they make that impossible. Then they have the gall to charge $299 - which they NEVER advised ahead of time and will not cancel or refund the first work day after a charge done on a Sunday the 12th of January. This is a private company pretending to be an educational institution as they got the .edu before it was restricted to real educational institutions. Don’t be fooled by this company.

They finally refunded the $299 on January 15 however it has not yet been reflected on my credit card.

Fraudulently charged me recurring premium charge for which I didn’t sign up. Looking back today at an account history of which I had been unaware, I also discovered yearly unauthorized charges of $99. Recently they charged me $299 one week after sending an email saying that my account would not be renewed because my credit card number had changed. I thought, oh good, too bad about the past, but well, at least it’s not renewing. So I took no further action. But then somehow they still managed to push this new charge through on my new credit card number which I had never provided to them nor authorized them to charge. I don’t know how they obtained this number. This is fraud. (Even more outrageous, they had done the same thing last year—sent an email saying no renewal, which should have been the end of it, but then still gotten my credit card (Wells Fargo visa) to pay a charge I never authorized.).