I’m really sorry to hear that your LingQ experience has been so bad!
“They may not be obliged to but every other subscription service with half decent communications would inform you because it’s good user experience and customer service.”
I don’t know what happened in your case, but I’ve renewed my subscription four years in a row, and I have always been notified by both Paypal and LingQ.
That is, you should get an invoice receipt containing all the subscription details from the LingQ support - and I always did!
“was not processed as a subscription at my bank”
Normally your bank statement displays payments for online subscriptions.
The downgrading process
Yes, this seems to be a problem for some users (even though the info is easy to find:
How do I downgrade my account to free?).
I’ve no idea why this wasn’t changed in the recent LingQ upgrade (from v4 to v5)
I"f you’ve been learning languages for around 7 to 8 years, I think you would get more out of looking directly for media and literature outside of LingQ"
Well, according to Dave’s LingQ stats (at least if they are correct), he has never reached an advanced level in any of his L2s. Therefore, there’s still a lot (!) of room for improvement in all his L2s.
That said, does he want to reach an adv. language level in any of his L2s? It’s not for us to decide because that’s completely up to him.
However, if he does want to reach such a level then Reader SW like LingQ, ReadLang, LWT, Lute, etc. is still quite useful… and common dictionaries on- or offline are no match for this type of software!