Anyone ever get out of an auto-renewing maintenance agreement (after the fact)?

kslight

Well-known member
Forgive me if this is not the right sub-forum, but I imagine everyone here has a maintenance agreement has some form of auto-renewal attached to it.

Long story short, we have a Xerox Docutech 6180 that auto-renewed at the end of last year. We told our rep no way at the renewal rate, and he and another Xerox sales rep came up with a new plan, which we agreed to, in order to save them a cancellation. Well, turns out Xerox chose to auto-renew at the rate we didn't accept, and now won't let us out of the annual term or fix the bill to match what their rep offered us. I have brought all the documentation from the sales reps to several folks at Xerox and they always defer to Guatemala...which you can expect don't have the authority to do anything. Of course, Xerox's only official solutions are to pay an "early termination fee" which is their way of saying "pay the rest of the contract" (and because the agreement includes 500k minimum impressions, that becomes about $30k, which is pretty insane), or to buy a replacement machine through them. Now that may have been the option that our sales rep was hoping for, but we don't want to buy a new machine through Xerox for a long list of reasons I've complained about in other threads...

So I'm asking...have you ever been able to resolve this...either pressing the right person, or having a lawyer get involved? I can understand why if this were a lease this would not be easy to fix, but we own the machine, a simple maintenance agreement seems like it should be pretty easy to do a 30 day cancellation on at worst.

I understand some countries and states outlaw these type of contracts, but as far as I can tell, our state offers no such protection.

Thanks
 
this maybe a dumb idea, and it might be after the horse got out of the barn .. . but you could put the "auto renew" on a credit card number and then cancel the card . . .
 
Not a good idea. Xerox could get you for breach of contract. I hope you got the sales promises in writing, hopefully with a signature or two from the rep. If not...
 
Sounds to me like you should be the one suing for breach of contract if they aren't following what you agreed to and signed.
 
Any progress on this? Just to let you know, Ricoh gave us enough incentives to offset the cost of kicking Xerox out a year early. There is a huge amount of room in machine prices from all manufacturers. Ricoh and KM will do just about anything to replace Xerox. It's all about market share.

We pushed the Xerox machines into the corner and didn't touch them. Xerox didn't get .000001 more than the minimum contract.
 

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