Inthe summer of 2023, 55-year-old Michigan resident Felisa Ware was hoping to improve her credit so she could buy a bigger house where her ailing mother could live with her. She signed up for a subscription service from TomoCredit. The six-year-old San Francisco startup, which is backed by investors including Morgan Stanley and Mastercard, promises to boost consumers’ credit scores by, among other things, helping them report additional on-time payments, including for rent and cell phone bills, to the credit bureaus. After six months, Ware decided Tomo’s “VIP” plan wasn’t worth the $34.99 a month she was paying for it. (Tomo typically charges an exorbitant $129.99 a month for this tier of service–Ware used a promotion to get a lower price.) Yet when she looked in Tomo’s app and on its website, she couldn’t find an option to cancel.

What followed was a maddening exchange of 20 emails, with Ware repeatedly asking Tomo’s customer support to cancel her subscription. Instead of honoring her request, Tomo replied with questions on why she was canceling and whether she’d rather receive a free month instead of deactivating. At one point, Tomo’s customer support team went dark for five days, then 20 days. “It was just so bizarre and frustrating,” Ware says. Exasperated, she emailed Michigan’s attorney general and started posting on social media, tagging Tomo’s corporate accounts and its CEO, 35-year-old Kristy Kim. “They're taking people's money," says Ware, who works in health care. “I work hard for my money.”

On January 28, 2024, about a month after her first request to cancel, TomoCredit attempted to charge Ware’s debit card again, though she had already called her bank and blocked any future Tomo charges. Finally, on January 30, her subscription was deactivated. Now Ware wonders what happens to Tomo customers who aren’t as persistent as she was. “I think about my mom, who is 78,” she says. “She would be so frustrated, and she would still be paying for that service to this day, because she would have just given up.”

Tomo CEO Kim says her customer service team had “good intentions” and aimed to understand why customers were dissatisfied. “Many of our customers are financially uneducated, unfortunately,” Kim says, adding that her support team tried “to make sure [users] at least got the basic benefit that we offer.” After we asked her pointed questions about Felisa Ware’s case and the absence of an online option to cancel, Tomo updated its app on October 9 to include a “Cancel Membership” button.

Kim says Tomo has roughly 100,000 paying subscribers; over the past year, consumers have filed 557 complaints to the Better Business Bureau about the startup. (To put that level of customer dissatisfaction in perspective, PNC Bank, the sixth largest bank in America with more than 10 million customers, received 599 Better Business........

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