Misleading, incorrect, and incoherent pricing all at the same time

[emikoa]

Recently I had the thought that I might be willing to give Verizon a little more money every month to upgrade my internet a bit. I go into the My Verizon app on my phone where it shows me, correctly, that I'm currently paying $49.99 a month:

When looking at my bill details, I can see that the full price of my service is $114.99, but I have $65 worth of discounts that have no expiration date.

I click the link in the app to "Learn More" about mixing and matching my plans, and I'm taken to a webpage in an in-app browser (where I have to login again even though I was already logged into the app) which now claims my current price is $99.99, $50 higher than what I actually pay, $15 lower than the full price quoted in my bill without discounts applied, or $5 less than the full price quoted with only the paperless billing discount applied. Cool. Off to a great start.

I click Modify Plan, and I'm taken to a page with a shopping cart that now claims I'm actually paying $94.99, not $99.99. Well, we're $5 closer, but this price still doesn't line up with any reality I know. But the menu of options says I can upgrade to 400 Mbps for "$20.00 more" per month, which going by this page's math would be $114.99.

I tap to select this upgrade and add it to my cart, but whoops! Instead of the $114.99 price I was led to expect, it turns out the new price will be $154.98!

Viewing the details, one thing is immediately obviously wrong: The quoted price apparently includes tacking on a new 400 Mbps service while continuing to pay for my current 100 Mbps plan, which now apparently only costs $29.99. Not the $49.99 I actually pay, or the $94.99, $99.99, or $114.99 that different parts of Verizon's websites and app have variously quoted my current plan price at. And, even if I subtract the erroneous double billing, the $124.99 new price quoted is still $30 more than the current price quoted, not the "$20 more" initially claimed.

Just when I think Verizon can't possibly give me a worse user experience shopping for a new plan, I go back to the app, then click back through the storefront from the same "Learn more" link in the app as before, and now the 400 Mbps plan is quoted as $80 more!

Adding this to my cart resulted in the same $29.99 + $124.99 = $154.98 dual-plan billing estimate that I got when the tile said "$20.00 more," so the one positive thing I can say is it seems Verizon is consistent about what price they'll slap on things in your cart, even when that price is calculated incorrectly. Later, after exiting the storefront and reopening it later, it's back to showing me "$20.00 more."

Honestly Verizon, I wanted to give you more money! Maybe $10-20 more every month! But you've apparently made it so the only option available to me without calling and sitting on hold forever is to pay $105 more per month and get two internet services delivered to one house. So my current plan will do me just fine. A+ job guys.

Addendum: Just when I thought for the second time that the user experience Verizon offers couldn't be shoddier, I attempted to post the above with screenshots showing all the price discrepancies, and got the error message, "Your post has been changed because invalid HTML was found in the message body. The invalid HTML has been removed. Please review the message and submit the message when you are satisfied." When viewing the HTML source, specifically it's the URLs pointing to my images that have been removed from the image tags, which were left behind with no 'src' parameter defined. I tried using Google Photos hosted URLs instead of Imgur, and got the same result. Why even offer the ability to embed images, hosted images only, and then remove any URL that points to a  hosted photo as "invalid HTML?" Let's see if it will let me just post a link to the Imgur album as a whole: https://imgur.com/a/tfmVvvu

Addendum to the addendum: Wow, the experience just keeps getting better. After posting the above, I was taken to a login screen, and after logging in, my original post was gone forever. Thankfully I had copied and pasted the source code into Notebook earlier to try to examine the "invalid HTML" problem so I was able to recreate the post without spending another 10 minutes on it. Hey Verizon web developers, maybe if you aren't going to store submissions in cache while someone is logging in so they can be resubmitted, and logging in is required to make a post, maybe prompt users to login BEFORE they spend time typing up a post.

Let's see if my now fourth or fifth attempt to make this post will actually result in this post being made...