I've had Spotify Premium continuously for 10 years. My earliest playlist is from 2016, my latest from this week. For the past year+ in the UAE I've been on a grandfathered Duo plan at ~32 AED/month.

A single payment failed on my bank's side. Quite literally the same minute I received an email: subscription terminated, account reverted to Spotify Free. No retry attempt, no warning, no grace period, no chance to update my card, just 'tough luck buddy'.

The Duo plan is no longer offered in the UAE. The only option now is Premium Platinum at ~57 AED, close to double. Support confirmed the plan cannot be restored by anyone: "the Duo plan is no longer offered in UAE anymore and the user who has failed payment can't subscribe for the old plan. No one can revert the Duo plan back to you." No escalation path, no exception process. After two advisor handoffs and hours of waiting, the answer was the same: upgrade or stay on Free.

Anti consumer by design or neglect?

This feels anti-consumer by default. A 10-year customer gets silently kicked off a legacy plan over a single failed payment, with no notice and no opportunity to fix it. The only path forward is a plan that costs nearly twice as much.

This doesn't need to happen. Send an email. Give three days to resolve it. Every other subscription service I use does this. If Spotify doesn't, it's either by design, meaning a convenient way to migrate grandfathered users to current pricing, or by neglect.

I'll probably take this as the push I needed to finally self-host my music library. Still a bit sad to end a 10-year continuous subscription over something this avoidable.