MindMeister

I had a really disappointing experience with MindMeister and hope this review saves others from wasting their time and money.
Here are the undisputed facts of my interaction with MindMeister –
- My company has been a customer of MindMeister since March 2021 and a spent $2,227 during that period
- On April 19, 2024 at 5:00pm I received an email saying they charged $419 for a subscription renewal for 4 users and 6 month term
-At 5:01pm I received another email offering savings if I subscribed for a year instead of 6 months
- At 6:08pm I shared that our team hasn’t used MindMeister at all other than me and I requested a refund for the 3 other licenses and said I was happy to renew my single license for a year
- Their response “I'm sorry to say that I cannot issue a refund in this case. As outlined at the time of purchase, selecting a billing period when purchasing a license causes your plan to renew automatically by default”
- I said that I have been a loyal customer and thought they issued notifications BEFORE a subscription renews like most companies since it is the law in most states
- Their response “I am sorry that you feel this way, but we notify our users about the automatic license renewal not only at the time of purchase but also in our terms & conditions and email invoices.”

You can decide if you want to work with a company that retains their loyal, multi-year customers by referencing ‘fine print’ in terms & conditions that no one can keep up with when they have over 30 different vendors and software providers. I know I prefer the many other alternatives that, in my opinion, care about their customers.

Their licensing is over priced and they will not tell you your agreement is due for payment until its due. They designed it this way, because according to their policy you need to provide them 30-days notice before canceling the next billing cycle. This is especially worrisome, because if you have an annual plan with them, they claim you are on the hook for another year.

This is very predatory in nature and indicates a desperate company. There are actually similar capes for free, really free, not will a pay wall added after a time frame.

I can't think of why anyone would use this given the alternatives in the market in 2021

MindMeister is the perfect tool if you and your team are visual in nature. I love the brainstorming aspects of the tool where you can let ideas flow onto the screen and then arrange them in a more logical format later. This would be a great option for creative projects like branding and marketing campaigns. This may not be the best choice if you are used to more text-based collaborative tools as you need to change your mindset a bit in order to fully use MindMeister.

Never had an issue with customer support, though we never really needed anything major as far as technical help. I do not believe they offer 24 hour customer support but we don't need it as MindMeister is not the type of tool we need need 24 hour a day support for. Overall, very happy with the level of support.

MindMeister is perfect for those entrepreneurs in Start-up/dream-up mode. It was also particularly helpful whenever we were doing some in depth competitive analysis. Being able to look at a 'birds eye view' of all our research was incredibly helpful - especially when it became time to discuss our projects amongst the entire team.