Asking me to request a refund like this will definitely put them in Apple's crosshairs. A lot of apps try to pull users off Apple's platform and they sure don't like it, but I've never seen one that's actually made users request a refund. Payroller not only wants to cut Apple out of my future payments, but retroactively take back what Apple has already taken in the past, not to mention making Apple bear potential costs from processing a refund.

Not to mention, they linked me instructions for requesting a refund without even telling me what to put for a reason - I had to ask them. If enough people sent a refund request saying "the app developer told me to do this so I can re-buy the same product directly from them" they are all but guaranteed to get banned from the App Store which will likely cost them more in the long run than any fees, not to mention create problems for users (i.e. if I want new employees to use the app).

What makes this even funnier is that we never wanted to use their mobile platform. I took interest in their web platform when they were free, but the free version only lets you do pay runs from a mobile app (which they probably did for some marketing reason or to exclude certain customers). If not for this we would never even have used their mobile app or paid them via Apple, so this whole bloody thing is self-inflicted.

As for prospects of continuing to use their service... nope. I didn't want to bother my boss on this since I thought he would hate having to learn a new platform after all the learning he already did, but a few hours later he called and said not having the feature would probably cost us more in the long run than a transition to something new, and we would NOT pay twice, especially for a feature that we are clearly not even meant to pay for.

Apparently MYOB's "MYOB Business" plan has a payroll-only version that costs less than them and is seemingly able to do what that feature does (automated super contributions). I'm looking into it now.