Care.com

I signed up at Care.com because I was in desperate need of a babysitter. Initially, I signed up for the free service. I posted a detailed description of what I needed. I started getting messages from people (over 50 of them) but I cannot read the messages. I needed to subscribe to be able to read them. Thinking that I have these many people interested on my job posting, I decided to get the one month subscription. To my disappointment, the messages I have received are not from people who are interested in the job. The "messages" are from people's summary profile and has nothing to do with the job I posted. I doubt any of them have read my job posting. I felt so deceived! I tried to message as many people as I could from the "messages" I received and only a few of them responded, all saying the timing does not work for them, except for one but she never did follow up. After this, I started reading reviews on Care.com, something I should have done first before giving them any money because all of them are negative. I read that they also automatically renew your subscription without saying so, which I thought was another form of deceit. I checked my profile and sure enough, I was on automatic renewal. So I changed it. It now says my subscription is set to expire in February so let's see if they charge me after that.
Care.com would be much better off by providing real service and real value to people instead of deceiving them into paying.
To anyone reading this, do yourself a favor and do not use Care.com in any way!

Care.com is the worst site ever. This site refuses to approve your profile, which means you cannot use the site and REFUSES TO GIVE A REFUND. Their actions are the worst.

I was so excited to join Care.com and have found that it is like all other scams, you think you have done all needed to get jobs and then are told they cant hire you unless you pay for an upgrade. They do not tell you upfront and expect UNEMPLOYEED person to pay to get the responses from the clients. I feel so mislead and disappointed that one more company cant be upfront. Shame on you for continuing this after the hundreds of complaints. I will tell everyone NOT to use this services.

Negative for customer service. I have questions and there is no one to speak to. It requires an email submission and up to 48 hours for a response. This isn't helpful at all.

I was a member on Care.com for a number of years. I ended up tutoring for over 10 clients. I had 9 5 star reviews on the site. Out of nowhere Care.com closed my account and would not offer a reason why. There customer service representative was extremely rude and ended up hanging up on me after stating there was nothing else she can do for me. No explanation, no anything. My account and profile vanished. This is a terrible way to conduct business.

I am adding my voice to the chorus of dissatisfaction about Care.com's use of auto-renewal. There is no way of opting out of the auto-renewal when you sign up, unlike other subscription-based services like *** or ***. Moreover, unlike a subscription service like ***, which notifies you when your subscription is about to ship (and incur charges), there is no such reminder with Care.com.
I've written separately to the company, and have spoken with a customer service representative, and the response both times was essentially, "too bad, we're a subscription service, you should have read the fine print." I guarantee that this will be their public response to this negative review, should someone chose to engage. But it's a non-response, since it doesn't get to the fundamental problem: you can't turn off the auto-renew. This leads me to believe that sneaking in monthly charges without providing a convenient way to opt out is a critical part of their business plan. It's a sure-fire way to add to their revenue, and judging by the number of complaints on this very issue, they have been very successful to date. It's a short-sighted model for making money, as I will never, ever use this service again. On that note, the service offered is pretty unremarkable, and I actually had better luck finding someone on Craigslist.com and paying for a separate background check. Overall, Care.com is a shady company that offers a mediocre service/product and lousy customer service. I would urge people to avoid it.

Automatic renewal without permission. No customer support personnel to reach out to.

Care.com advertises quality care and customer service, neither of which I received. They’re unreliable, only want your money, and really are worthless: the people they provide are unreliable, unavailable, and inexperienced. Their customer service is a joke. They repeat each other rather than actually consider the issues and help. I wouldn’t recommend this website to anyone looking for real help.

Negative experience
Beware, Care.com uses unfair refund/renewal policies. I have not use the website, where I had a Premium account, since May/June 2017. There is no option on the Account page to set the subscription to "NOT auto-renew", which means that the business (if you can call it) relies intentionally on people forgetting to cancel or downgrade. So, when my subscription got auto-renewed, there was (1) no email notifying me that the subscription is about to be renewed nor (2) email about the fact that my credit card has been charged for the new subscription after the renewal on November 12. Either #1 and/or #2 is what good businesses would do, but not care.com. Some businesses have an option to have a setting not renew automatically, but not care.com. So, when my credit card bill arrived and I was about to pay it later in December (there is a grace period on credit cards as we all know), I saw the charge. By that time it's been more than 30 days since the charge and they refuse to refund the money. They can see that I have not used the site for several months, but nevertheless are refusing the refund. I hope, one day these predatory practices would be illegal, but now all I can do is to spread the word so that others would be careful about subscribing to the site.

The company is absolutely awful. They will auto renew your membership even if you only signed up for a single month. They also have a very strict refund policy which is basically NO REFUNDS. I had apparently been on auto renewal for nearly a YEAR (fees lumped into my regular iTunes account), and yet, I received regular emails from them trying to get me to sign up for membership. This just doesn't make sense. I post here, obviously because they refused any refund. 1 month membership is just a higher fee you pay monthly rather than signing up for a few months at a lower rate. Unbelievable.

This is a horrible system of doing business. I found nobody on this service. Plus, they do not inform you they're about to charge your credit card for "auto renewal." Only if you check your statements, which I do, do you see a huge charge! And then when you cancel, they do not refund the unused time period! I know of NO OTHER COMPANY that renews automatically an ANNUAL subscription without notifying you. I have other subscriptions, and I get an email in time for me to cancel if I want to. At the very least, they should refund the unused portion of the membership, which all other companies I've ever dealt with do, including magazine subscriptions. Magazines don't just say, "too bad, we're keeping your money for the rest of the year, and we're going to continue to send you the magazine you don't want anymore." I do not recommend this company to anybody, caregiver or care seeker. There are better companies out there. I am in the process of disputing their charge. Janice C should be embarrassed of herself--people seeking care should not be taken advantage of, it's hard enough to be a parent today.

I was lured in like many parents from Care.com's super adorable little TV ads. Wow! Shame on you and your horrible practices! I was being charged every 3 months without my knowledge. In the everyday world, they call this 'stealing.'
When signing up, I chose their 3 month plan, not their one month plan, since this implies that after 3 months of using Care.com I'll have no further commitment. I presumed we would connect with the right sitter, but it just didn't work out for us within 3 months. So we stopped using Care.com only after a few weeks. I found out a year later, we have been charged every 3 months for services that we did not use!! They do not Care about their integrity or their reputation, nor do they Care about busy parents of toddlers, children, and the elderly who have no time to read disclaimers and fine print and play these manipulative 'subscription' games. Instead of stealing from my kids food and clothes budget every 3 months, maybe they could call us and say, "Hi tired parent, you haven't logged into care.com for about a 3 months or... a year!, How can we help?, Should we cancel your subscription if there is no further need of our services?" But I guess our hard earned money is being used to pay for those charming TV commercials instead.
Sheila L *** who is the CEO of Care.com should be ashamed of her business practices. You know exactly what you are doing. So please revise your website.
Solution: Simply make it very clear next to every option that "You will be automatically charged every Month / 3 Months / Yearly." Do not put that information in a separate disclaimer. In fact Don't make it automatically recurring unless customers ASK for or choose this option! If we like a service, we will naturally renew Sheila. It's called customer loyalty.
And where is the phone number to talk to a human being? How can you name your site Care.com and not have an easily accessible phone number for your customers.
I wanted to call and simply say, "Have a very Merry Christmas, from our family to yours. God bless you and your army of hard working Care.com employees."

Awful business practices. I just signed up to hire a sitter and was in the middle of interviewing a possible sitter for my children and they suspended my account stating something came back on my background check(I did not know they were running a check but it is understandable) It even showed a non conviction for a non violent/ non sexual charge years prior and they still made the judgement to suspend my account and state they plan on refunding me my month subscription I paid for. (I have yet to see a refund) I called to explain and they were like oh well sorry it is non reversible some one else made the call. This was highly inconvenient and not fair. I will not recommend this company to anyone. They are losing good business.

SCAM. They sell your information. Been getting phishing text the past 8 months. CS has not done anything about it. I am not the only one.

I have been a premium member (care provider) of Care.com for over a year and I have gotten some clients through them. Does the modest amount of new work justify having to put up with all the problems and aggravation of working with Care? I'm moving toward the "no" column steadily.
I am somewhat relieved to see that my frustrations are shared by so many. I've spent so many hours trying to figure out how things work on their site. And, like so many others on here, I give a C- to their out-sourced customer service department. There have been some good reps which is why I'm not giving an F but on average the experience has been exasperating. Some of the reps do not know their product and often give out misinformation. They are often hard to understand and when I ask them for a rep Stateside they tell me I have to keep calling the service number as it's shared between domestic and out-sourced workers. One day recently I called 5 times and couldn't get a Stateside rep. I begin to think they don't exist. It is very difficult to even get to a human period. I have it down to a science after a year- I know what menu options to hit. Most do not lead to human contact.
I echo what some have said about the review process on Care. I've had a couple of clients who never got the link to give the review and I've had to call again. On the profile one has no control over what reviews remain visible in the work history section - the system automatically lists the most recent clients with their dates even if there are no reviews. They cycle out older ones whose reviews may be excellent.
One of my biggest complaints is how they go about measuring a care giver's performance. i.e. if you have an email exchange with a potential client and you the caregiver are not the last one to post a comment your rating for responsiveness goes down. Suppose there is nothing to say? We've concluded business and it's time to move on. It doesn't matter. You must be the last to respond or Big Brother computer docks you. It took me half a year until I found this out by calling customer service. It is not listed in the FAQs sections to my knowledge. Add to that the problem when you're getting spammed by the folks who have a dog care job available and will be moving to your area in the next month and want you to send a resume to a gmail address outside of Care. The spamming is so bad that I stopped responding to all those emails and each time I ignored them my responsiveness rating went down. I am now at 49% And I've responded to 100% of legitimate inquiries.
Care.com needs to clean up their act if they want to continue having quality caregivers and clients. I'm signed on for another year but will be leaving if I don't see improvements to their online platform and customer service performance.

Care.com lacks the fundamental principles of business. Customer service! They also have an arduous process to initiate refunds and a refund policy that places consumers at a disadvantage if they are not satisfied with their platform. I would not recommend their service.

they charge after you canelled and you cant get of hold of them they say that they do background checks yes at 300 dollar please help don't use them

I signed up for Care.com on Sept. 17, 2015. I was charged a fee of 76.50 in Sept. 2015 and $ 95.62 on December 17, 2015. In January 2016, I called and asked them to stop my subscription.
Because the amount was taken out only quarterly, I missed the item on my credit card statement. Care.com has been charging me $97.43 quarterly since March 16, 2016 for a sum total of $682.01.
They make it very difficult to speak with someone when you call. I finally reached someone which escalated issue to billing. They agreed to refund 3 payments. I'm not satisfied with this and was told that there was nothing else that I could do and that the decision was final.
So, I'm wanting to warn others of this very unethical business they are running.

It is disgraceful that Care.com will not refund a $35 monthly reoccuring payment when I caught the charge on an old credit card 20 months later. First I called, and the agent CONFIRMED I had not logged onto the system in the past 20 months. They reassured me this would be reviewed and I would receive a refund. To my shock, the company only refunded 1 month (or $35), rather than the $700 they charged me WITHOUT MY PERMISSION. How is this acceptable???

Please read the fine print. They disappointed me greatly on how they handled my concerns.
BEWARE!