mikedvzo

As of June 2023, you can no longer purchase services a' la carte and have to purchase the entire Mercedes Me services for $150 a year. I used to pay 15$ each for Vehicle Setup and Monitoring. Now I have to pay $150 for services that I do not use or my car does not support. I will cancel everything and live without and never buy another MB again! Tell me if you feel the same way.

superswiss

Yes, I renewed for the second time. It's now cheaper for me at $150 than what I paid a-la-carte for all the services I was using, and the first 3 years were free. What you gonna buy? Tesla charges $99/year, Audi starts at $365/year with only 6 months free. BMW charges similar to MB. Do you complain about having to pay for gas as well, because MB installed an internal combustion engine instead of a powertrain that runs on free magic dust? Do you think the servers, data pipes etc. are free, and the staff maintaining them works for free? You are whining about $12/month and you drive a Mercedes. Really?

mikedvzo

That is exactly my point. I pay for gas because I need it! I do not want to pay $120 a year for services I either do not need or my car does not support. Would you pay for an all-wheel drivetrain service when you only have front-wheel drive? I own a 2021 718 GTS Cayman and I only pay $15 a month for Remote Services. Probably sell my Mercedes for a Macan S. Been on the fence for a while and this will help with the decision process.

superswiss

That is a fundamental crux of commercial products. Rarely anybody ever uses all the features they pay for. For example, do you have a smartphone? Do you use every single feature that it came with or were you able to buy a phone a-la-carte with just the features you actually use? What about your data service? Are you using all the data every month that you are paying for? With software and services you pay for a license to use something. How much of it one uses and whether it's worth the price is up to the individual.

mikedvzo

I do not think your analogies are valid! I don't pay for Apps on my iPhone I do not use. I do not buy the MS Office Suite if I only need MS Word. I do not pay for unlimited data if I only use 1G a month. So that would be a no. Thanks for making my point for me 🙂

superswiss

I'm not talking about third-party apps. I'm talking about what comes standard with the OS. Yes, some services offer tiers, but not all do, or the tiers still include way more than you actually use. Have you ever had cable service? Even with the basic tiers you paid for over 100 channels. Did you watch them all?

mikedvzo

You keep making my argument for me. 🙂 Cable SPs offer a la carte, so you pay for Basic service and then pay for extras. Everyone does not pay for HBO. iPhone OS is free, and you pay for the HW. If you want an additional apps, you buy them. Mercedes Me Connect now has one option, which is all or nothing. A better comparison would be SPs charging the same for everyone regardless of the channels they want. How would you feel if Comcast said to you one day that your service went from $ 30$ a month to $150 a month, and you get all the channels or nothing and cannot buy Basic Service?

superswiss

I see we are going in circles. You keep bringing in more apples and oranges. HBO etc. are premium channels. They sit between cable and pay-per-view. Which cable service offers a-la-carte? Like I only want NBC and ABC for example and no other channel? Granted, I dropped cable a long time ago in favor of streaming services, so maybe Comcast finally offers a-la-carte for all channels not just premium channels, but I'm sure I'd have read about that. In fact the scenario you are describing with Comcast used to happen regularly as they moved channels I actually watched from the Basic Tier to a higher tier, so they forced me to upgrade to a higher tier and pay for even more channels I'm not watching. So I really don't think you get what I'm saying. That's ok, though. If you think you'll find a-la-carte option with another luxury brand then I wish you good luck. Feature and service bundling is the reality we live in. I'm not saying I like it, but it's the reality.

mikedvzo

If more people complained then maybe they would revert back to the old policy. Forget HBO, every TV provider has had multipole Tier options for decades with various channel options. They are just trying to rape people after the fact. You live in CA so you are used to it I presume. 🙂 I will just drop the service since I use it very infrequently anyway.

superswiss

Used to what? California has the most consumer protection among all states in the union, it is a pro-consumer state. I know the pro-business people hate it, but it's a great place to be as a consumer. Anyway, I agree if the service is not worth it to you, you should drop it. It's not a rip off for everybody. It might have gotten lost in the discussion, but the single bundle price ends up being cheaper for me than the a-la-carte options were last year. All the services I'm getting now for $150 added up to over $200 last year, so I ended up not renewing remote start since I rarely used it. Now I have remote start again and still pay less than last year. One person's loss is another person's gain I suppose.

benz_driver

The services bundling IMHO isn't what I wanted as I prefer a la carte, however, the few services in that bundle that I do use are worth the cost. Given that the cost of the connection to Google Cloud Services v2 alone eats up most-to-all of that cost, the Navigation Services alone are worth the out-of-pocket cost to me.

mikedvzo

The problem is the raised prices by 5 times from 30$ to $150 in the middle of my ownership. Do what you want with new vehicles but this is horrible customer service. Similar to the awful experience when they broke my MBUX for 2 years with Apple CAr paly buttons on the console and I could not escalate to anyone.

Mr. Toad

My car came with the original Mercedes Me software (before "Connect" was tagged on) and it was partially or completely non-functional throughout the entire "complimentary" period. The car also spent a lot of time at the dealer for this problem and they were never able to fix it. When the comp period ended, MB bombarded me with marketing communications to begin paying for it. I wrote to them and requested that they extend the free trial because I had never been able to fully utilize the product; they declined, so I declined to start paying them. It was crap software then with no credible support, and I expect its successor is the same.

mikedvzo

The software is actually very good. I have no complaints with it. I just don’t use it that much in a car it’s not that necessary most of the time so not worth $150 a year. and yes, the customer service sucks. I had a similar problem with My Porsche and they escalated to Germany to development and they solved the problem. When I called Mercedes they had no way of escalating it, and did absolutely nothing except for bounce me around dozens of times while I waited for two years for them to solve the problem. Customer service redirected me to the dealer and the dealer redirected me back to customer service. The dealer said they had no way of escalating it software issue because it comes from Mercedes and customer service said they had no way of escalating it. These automobile manufacturers have not figured out how to deal with software yet cause they’re really new to it.

Mr. Toad

My experience EXACTLY.