Beware of Hidden Contract Terms like Auto-renewal Clauses and Built-in Price Increases.
Updated August 20, 2021

Beware of Hidden Contract Terms like Auto-renewal Clauses and Built-in Price Increases.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform

We use Meltwater as a News Aggregator tool and as a social media intelligence tool to a lesser degree. It helps business leaders to stay on top of industry news through a daily newsletter, and it allows the Marketing Department to monitor public sentiment of the brand.

Pros

  • Nothing

Cons

  • Big learning curve for minimal results with dashboards, filters and reports.
  • Very expensive for what it offers.
  • Appalling customer service.
  • Too many account limitations even with an expensive package.
  • Difficult to customize properly.
  • Irrelevant content is hard to filter out.
  • Shady business practices.
  • Negative Impact. Very little value provided at a high cost.
Meltwater is the most expensive option with the worst customer service. Terrible experience.

Do you think Meltwater delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Meltwater's feature set?

No

Did Meltwater live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Meltwater go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Meltwater again?

No

The product is difficult to use and quite expensive compared to alternatives on the market. It does its job well enough once you learn to use it, but given the price, the low quality of customer service, and the sneaky implementation of hidden clauses in the contract, I can only recommend to anyone considering using this tool to stay away from this product. Overpriced, difficult-to-use software with little value to offer.

Using Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform

5 - Management roles
  • Company news sentiment monitoring
  • Following industry news
  • Social Media sentiment monitoring
  • Tracking PR campaign performance
  • Tracking Social Media Campaigns performance
  • None, we are stopping its use as soon as possible
Definitely not renewing due to bad support, sneaky contract clauses, and extremely high prices

Evaluating Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform and Competitors

  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
The decision was made by someone who has since left the company. We inherited the tool and decided to keep it because the sales team showed us lots of promising features that would had allowed us to monitor the competitive landscape quite easily. After using the tool for a few months, we lost confidence in it.
I would had ensured having a trial period with a money back guarantee to ensure satisfaction with the product before being on the hook for a long time period. I would had also focused on reducing the price drastically and evaluating alternatives.

Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform Support

Terrible responsiveness from the team except to up-sell services. The time dedicated to helping you set up a functioning account disappears once the money is in the bank and there is no hope for selling further upgrades.
ProsCons
Problems get solved
Slow Resolution
Poor followup
Less knowledgeable
Escalation required
Difficult to get immediate help
Need to explain problems multiple times
Support doesn't seem to care
Slow Initial Response
No, suppliers should provide quality support to all users and not just those who pay extra for it.
No, never happened. Support offered was always subpar.

Using Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform

Hard to use tool with little value to offer.
ProsCons
None
Do not like to use
Unnecessarily complex
Difficult to use
Not well integrated
Inconsistent
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Feel nervous using
Lots to learn
  • Any minor task becomes painful to complete

Relationship with Meltwater

They have a great sales team that is very cooperative and make everything seem easy. Sadly, this level of support disappears as soon as the money is in the bank.
The vendor would only try to sell us more services and products and was not very helpful in showing us how to extract value from the existing product and service we were contracting.
£4,000 for Meltwater Regular and Premium Social Package.
Don't waste your time. Find a different provider. If you still want to continue with the folly of working with Meltwater, then be extra careful when reading the contract terms as they tend to sneak autorenewal clauses and automatic price increases into the Terms of Service which are only referenced on the contract, but not shown.

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