Hiatus: Bill and Money Manager Reviews

My job requires that I have an unlimited internet data package, and my AT&T bill had gotten up to $175 a month. I have been searching for a way to lower it, as it was getting quite unmanageable. I learned about this app through an ad on Instagram and, even though I didn’t believe it would really help, I gave it a try. In addition to pointing out a few iTunes Store subscriptions I forgot I was paying for, Hiatus informed me that my phone bill was much higher than it probably should be. It asked if I would like the this app team to negotiate with AT&T (on the condition that if they were able to save me money, they would receive half of the savings for the first year only) to try and lower my bill. I consented. A day or two later, I was notified that they had found $50 worth of internet data belonging to my iPad that I was never using and they asked if they could change the plan for the iPad from unlimited to 1GB, which is about how much I have been using each month (my phone package would stay the same), and I accepted. They saved me $600 a year. I still didn’t really believe it was true until I called to pay my past due AT&T bill and instead of the balance being $180 ($175 plus a late fee), it was $122. WHAT?! They really did negotiate with AT&T and it happened so fast that the bill, which was already past due, reflected the savings! I’m amazed and I am so thankful I found this app! Thank you!!

After downloading this app I didn’t hear anything for a while. Then I got a message that they saved me $30 a month on my AT&T bill - $360 a year. And they were taking half of it now ($180). That was cool - but I didn’t realize they took it immediately. I went to look at my phone bill when it updated and it was $20 more than it had been. After messaging them they said that sometimes the companies aren’t honest and they end up charging more. After waiting several days I was informed that they made my Apple Watch a separate line which is what caused the rate increase. One of the people from this app told me this was being taken care of. I asked, and there is no $30 a month savings now and I’m not eligible for any other savings at this time. Oh, and my $180 would take 7-10 days to be refunded. So, I’m down $180 for 7-10 more days, my cell phone bill won’t be fixed until April, so I’m down $20 for another month, and, the icing on the cake was that when I contacted AT&T to verify that they’d corrected my account they actually hadn’t and I had to wait on hold for several minutes to correct their mistake. I immediately deleted my account. I wouldn’t trust Hiatus, but if you do, make sure to keep an eye on everything. My accounts will eventually even put but to have something like this happen, and only be fixed because I was watching like a hawk is unforgivable. They get a free $180 loan from me for about a month. Can I charge interest?

After reading that they randomly charge you, I told them to stop negotiating for me and cancel it all, and they didn’t and WILL NOT respond to me! I’ve read other reviews and it appears that the savings charges and charges from your bill do not line up and will go for 12 months, even if the savings negotiated was for less than that time frame. I’m NOT OKAY with paying with the savings is over or on any date that does not correspond with my bills! They should be more clear about that!

UPDATE
They finally responded and cancelled for me, but they had already negotiated. They said that they will just let me keep the six months of savings without charging me for them. We’ll see how it goes...I definitely cannot afford the random charges others have complained of or the charges past the savings date.

First, yes, negotiating your various bills and subscription rates down is something really anyone can/could do for oneself & all the personal financial advice people will tell you to do so. But it is somewhat easier said than done and I really hate trying to navigate customer service phone bank hell. I also work long hours, at night, and am unable to make personal calls at work so finding time to do this for myself is also a pain.

So anyhow, I downloaded Hiatus right before I went to sleep and within a few hours I woke up to 3 notifications that they’d found savings of just under $1000 for me over the course of a year. So, yeah, super!! Ummm, yes, they make money by charging you 50% of the amount saved - it’s disclosed right there in black & white, plain English, so I don’t know how people are surprised or somehow don’t understand how it works. Of course I do wish it were a smaller percentage cut but I’m still saving a decent amount over time. Also, I’ve verified savings with all 3 accounts (AT&T UVerse, Verizon, SiriusXM). Thanks y’all!

While they successfully managed to “save” me a little bit on my Verizon bill, what they failed to do was be honest about their services. To call themselves a FREE service is dishonest. When dealing with people’s money, the need to be completely open about the way things work is necessary. Instead of letting me know what they would be taking from me, they informed of what they would be saving me over the course of a year. That may be all well and good, but not letting your customers know what will be automatically drawn out of your account as a result of those “savings” is wrong and displays a lack of honesty. In trying to talk with someone, I was told that all communications are done by email and that I couldn’t talk to an actual person. Once again, you’re dealing with people’s finances. If they’d like to have a conversation with you about what is happening with THEIR money, the option to speak with a customer representative at least during regular business hours should absolutely be available. The woman I did communicate with via email did nothing for me other than copy and paste some information from their website and then cease to respond to my concerns. This feels way more like a scam than something that helps people.

First off, they have since changed the screen shots on how Hiatus works. When I installed it, it showed text communications allowing you to accept or decline and the terms. Not the case at all! Offered to negotiate my a dish network bill for me. I did not understand the “savings” I would receive over the entire year, that half of that value was due to them in a one time payment immediately. Unfortunately my family lives paycheck to paycheck and anything I think will save us money I try. Not the case here. I’ve been charged $159 for their portion and in process all they did was cut my programming to the minimum and cancel my local channels. I was sent an email from them, which is sent in fine print by the way, that according to Dish there is a piece of equipment connected to my TV that I’m not supposed to have or be charged for. Totally false!!!! I’ve emailed their support address with no response. I don’t know how this is rated at 4.4 stars. Like another reviewer, I would give this a ZERO if I could. One star is overly generous. I only hope they will respond and refund my money. My family cannot afford this. This is fraudulent in my opinion but obviously has helped someone to get the rating they have. Not worth it!!!!

I love the idea of Hiatus, and they did succeed in lowering my AT&T bill by $120 a year. I haven’t received my monthly statement from AT&T yet, so I can’t speak as to whether the changes will be included on this bill or not.

The way it works is that this app collects 50% of the savings for the first year. So for me, since they saved me $120, that would be $60 paid to this app. I assumed that this amount would be broken down into monthly payments, but I was charged the entire $60 at once. I feel that this was not adequately explained prior to lowering the bill. I sent a message to inquire and it took them about 2 days to respond. They told me that if the amount owed to this app is over $100, there is a payment plan available, BUT you have to request it within 72 hours and there is a 9$ admin fee. Again, this was not made clear prior to lowering the bill.

At this point, I think Hiatus is a cool concept but would advise other users to proceed with caution and read the fine print, as some aspects of the process are not made obvious.

I would give zero stars if I could, all I ended up with was a huge headache & hassle. They “negotiated” my sprint bill, okay cool.. I got an email from them stating I’d be saving $25/month & they would be charging me the 50% fee from that savings which would equally $175 total for 12 months. Sounded good to me.. I’d still be saving money, right? Wrong. They failed to mention that they altered my plan, and from doing so it canceled out other promotions and savings I was already receiving.. I only figured this out after taking it upon myself to contact sprint to make sure everything went smoothly. So basically, I was going to be paying the $175 fee yet not saving a cent after all is said and done, they don’t thoroughly go through the details with your service provider which in my opinion is horrible, I’m so glad I checked for myself! Currently in the process of trying to reverse the negotiation and make sure they don’t charge my card the $175. Please do yourself a favor, contact your providers yourself, most times they are willing to work with you and provide any current discounts or promotions to save you some $. It’s unnecessary to have a middle man, in all honesty.

While Hiatus was helpful in seeing all of my subscriptions in one place it took a lot of effort to get them to show up and to get all of my account verified. Hiatus seemed very slow like it couldn’t quite handle what I was asking of it and there was a lot of backing out and retrying - just in the initial setup. I hadn’t looked at it in awhile and I guess some of my verifications needed to be updated, so I attempted to do this and nothing would show up on the screen and then I would get error messages. Finally I got a message that basically said I needed to do some sort of total reset with the verifications but didn’t tell me how to do that and I wasn’t able to find anywhere to do it. I tried to contact support and they never responded. Unfortunately before I deleted my account I tried to have them negotiate my phone bill. They never came back to me about it but I have a feeling after reading these other reviews that they are going to charge me anyways. This had the potential to be a really handy app but the poor service and the fact that they simply aren’t going to do what they say is incredibly disappointing.

I downloaded Hiatus and requested a negotiation to lower my cell phone bill. Then I completely forgot about it. I get a text this morning asking if I’d like to save money on my cell phone bill. I said of course! Well this app negotiated a credit and a significant cut in my phone costs. They saved me $70 or so dollars a month and the credit I received is going to mostly cover the next bill!

This is the important part I learned today.

The first negotiation is free. The fee is $7 to $10 a month depending on the plan you choose. This cell phone bill was my first negotiation request. I keep the entire credit.

this app will receive 50% of all future savings from successful negations. If this cell phone bill negotiation hadn’t been my first free negotiation and this app had taken 50% of my savings I would still have come out ahead because my future bills have been so drastically reduced.

Make sure what you are going to pay a bill negotiator makes sense for your situation. Your paying someone to do the talking to save you money. If someone offered to do that for free I would be suspicious.

Hiatus . It’s useful, uncomplicated, shows me banking activity at a glance but not in great detail. The categories don’t always make sense for my spending but the numbers are correct so I’m happy.

Over all very satisfied with the service even if the fee structure isn’t as clear as it could be.

At first it sounded like a good deal. They negotiated my account with SiriusXM. Said I would be saving over $100 for the year. You do have to give this app half of the savings up front, which they didn’t waste any time taking. I was told it might take a month or two for it to for the lower payments to kick in, so I was patient. After still not seeing my saving after month 4 I contacted Diann who said they would reach back out to SiriusXM....When she contacted me again she informs me that my cheaper payments didn’t start because I didn’t pay using automatic draft. I have all my correspondences with the this app company and no where in any of these does it say it has to be paid by automatic draft. She did say that they tried to set it up again but the card I have on file didn’t go through. I have a card on file because I have too, but I pay the bill with a different card, again because the very important information about paying with automatic draft was never shared with me. I am surprised that I received my refund for the amount they took out of my account already and that is probably why I gave them that 1 star!!

Spent $7 to have them negotiate my Verizon bill while ensuring me that they could save me money. It took them a week and a half to get back to me and say that I am already getting the best deal there is. So, my bill didn’t lower. They also have an option of helping you lower your auto insurance. There is a short questionnaire that you fill out and at the end, there are suggestions on who might save you money yet the links would never work. Instead, I was getting numerous phone calls and texts from people of other insurance companies wanting to offer me a quote. I thought the point of Hiatus was for YOU guys to do the work. Well, reluctantly, I spoke with someone for 10-15 minutes who quoted me $60 higher for the exact auto insurance I have. No thanks. So, Hiatus did not do what it said it would do. After that, I really just wasn’t interested in seeing what else they offered. I’m not even going to fight them for a refund because other reviews have said it’s almost impossible to get a refund. So, not worth my time.

I signed up, paid the $10 for it in May. It didn’t do anything and “couldn’t find” anything to negotiate so I canceled. In June I was charged the $10 again and figured that I just hadn’t canceled in enough time to not be charged the $10. Nope now on month 5 and I’m STILL being charged for Hiatus monthly, I have no access to my account being told that I don’t have an account by Hiatus and the website, and when I contacted their customer service they requested the screen shots I took and when I gave them the screenshots they kept telling me I was just “logging on wrong” and to try it again and cancel it myself, when I explained that I’ve been trying to cancel it and that’s why I contacted them they told me “we’re sorry to see you go, here are the steps to do it yourself” so now I don’t know if they actually have canceled my account or if I’ll be charged again next month. I have half a mind to show all the same screenshots I have sent them to my bank and report them as fraud, since without my consent they have continued to charge me after I ended my account.

I started seeing people post about Hiatus and thought maybe I’ll check it out... well, they did manage to find me savings on my cell phone bill but I’ll tell you what they don’t.. they find the cheapest alternative for your plan, not the best one that suits your needs. They changed my plan so drastically that I have lost so much of my time and money and they don’t seem to care about any of it. I’m now paying $100/month for a phone that has data so slow I could drive to the library and find the information faster than it is pulling up on my phone.. they will also make changes without you accepting or declining.. I said “decline” once I learned about how terrible the data speed was that they went ahead and changed my phone plan AND charged me on their behalf. I have spent hours trying to get my plan changed back and my cell phone provider just can’t do it because the features I had are no longer an option. I’m furious and the idiots at this app will do nothing to make it right. I have hired an attorney at this point. Please run the other direction and get this company shut down!!! Thieves!

Seems like Hiatus has potential to be a very useful and insightful app. Although, I can’t say for sure because they want you to sign up for a $9.99/mo subscription to access any of their features. They do not offer any kind of trial to see if it’s something you’d be interested in.
The ONLY thing you can use Hiatus for without making any kind of purchase is link your accounts to it using Plaid and see a grouped list of your purchases from all of your spending accounts. EVERY SINGLE FEATURE OUTSIDE OF THE ABOVE MENTIONED IS ONLY ACCESSIBLE WITH A SUBSCRIPTION.
So unfortunately I’ll be deleting Hiatus . Which is really unfortunate because like I’ve said, it seems to have great potential to be a fantastic app.

My suggestion for the devs:
🔹 If you’re going to limit every feature, that would make Hiatus even the slightest bit useful, until a subscription has been purchased then I’d suggest either offering a 3-7 day (atleast) trial first OR make this a paid app so we can purchase it once and be done with it.

It’s incredibly misleading to offer this as a free app with a subscription if you’re going to limit every feature until a subscription has been purchased.

So maybe I will circle back to this in a few months and see if any changes have been implemented. It would be great to see the full power of Hiatus before coughing up my hard earned money. Until then, Hiatus has been deleted.

Thanks!

I signed up to try it out thinking why not. In retrospect, I should have paid closer attention to the part where it says “you agree to pay this app 50% of what you save” as they managed to lower one of my bills by $120 over a 12 month period. I cancelled before they found a way to lower my bill as I had attempted to do so on my own and was only minimally successful (I don’t think I inquired about the Internet with DirecTV, just the TV programming so they didn’t feel the need to inform me of other savings options). Anyway, instead of saving $120, I got charged $60 today (no more than a week after signing up for this app). So they made their money. They still got me savings of $60 over the next 12 months...but I think this app would be more successful if they lowered their percentage of what they get for helping people lower their bills. 50% of the savings is a lot especially if they take it out in one lump sum and the savings comes in increments over a year.

Hiatus automatically scanned all my stuff and automatically started lowering bill negotiations which I failed to understand would all be automatic so instead of giving me a final warning that I would be charged $250 immediately. So after writing SEVERAL emails to this JOKE of a company I finally received emails back saying there was nothing I could do and I would have to start a payment plan which I reluctantly agreed to thinking that maybe my bill would actually be reduced but my cell phone bill hasn’t gone down ONE CENT and to make it even worse after the initial issue I asked that my account be cancelled and closed out and all my information removed. But somehow I am receiving an email from them again saying that my account is about to auto renew on the 28th and it’s showing information from my new card that I just got a week ago and have most DEFINITELY not entered into their system. I’ve been emailing them all week and still haven’t received a single respond. They don’t answer their phones all they are here for is to steal your information and your money DO NOT USE

I was skeptical at first, and it turns out my skepticism was warranted. When the this app team “negotiated” my ATT bill in the middle of a billing cycle I was pro-rated for the data that was used, and was told that I would see a credit on my next bill. I accepted this as it seems fair, although I did not like it since my bill had gone up nearly $90 for that cycle. this app then took their portion of the yearly savings, again I understand they have to get paid. However, once the next billing cycle came up(current billing cycle) there is NO CREDIT, and my wireless bill is HIGHER than it was before any of the negotiations!! I took screen caps and sent them to Diann, who I don’t think has even looked at them yet. After days of not hearing from her, I opened a chat with Diann, Todd, and Nicholas. It has been 3 days and they have not even looked at my messages. Hoping this 1-Star review will get some attention to my issue.

Note:I have ATT, and DirecTV, I understand this app negotiates for the entire account. I have not received my DirecTV bill yet, but once I do I will provide them with that information as well.

In the agreement when you set up your account you are informed that the company will act on your behalf, but no changes will be made without your permission. After I received a proposal email that had no professional formatting at all and then a follow up saying to disregard the previous one I became skeptical. Research online showed many people have problems with this, all similar to mine. I declined the proposed negotiations and closed my account. Two business days later I was charged $250. I contacted their customer support and they said that I had agreed to the terms and this was their fee. This all happened after I had received a cancellation email from them. I went to AT&T to check my account, the notes stated that a this app employee posed as myself and try to make changes to the account. They did not have all my security information so they were not able to do so. this app is claiming that they did make changes without my permission and that is what the fee is for. I have disputed this charge with my bank. I am reporting them to the FCC and the Better Business Bureau.

Beware of this type of money saving. If you really needed to save money go elsewhere. They charge you for saving it! If I need to save money, why am I paying it to them? Do your own research and negotiations for free. Don’t trust Hiatus. They made a mistake with with negotiating my phone bill and they removed a line of service(which they clearly said they won’t do in faq and terms of of service) which I needed and they still are trying to charge me. When I explained this to them they had two people try to reverse the error, but they said that I have to pay them anyway. For what! They are not a customer based company because they only apologized that I wasn’t satisfactory with their service. I used the service to attempt to lower my phone bill and they removed a line that I needed. They had two people to try and reverse the error and now they keep trying to charge me 245 dollars! Customer support takes forever to get back to you, and I’ve left several messages, no one has contacted me, They just keep trying to charge my card. Stay away!!!!!