I was hit with a $48.96 debit on my Namecheap account balance yesterday for 17 WhoisGuard renewals.
Most of the domains that the WhoisGuard subscriptions were protecting were set to expire, and so each domain's auto-renew was turned off. Yet I was still charged.
Feeling outraged, I contacted their support trying to get the charges back credited to my account - that money would be better spent on domain renewals on some 40 pointless domains than on WHOIS privacy nonsense.
Namecheap's support great as always, granted me an one-time exception to their "all sales are final" policy. The support representative spent some 20 minutes on what seemed like deleting and refunding each WhoisGuard subscription individually.
It turns out that all WhoisGuard subscriptions are regarded as their own entity, and are not affected by the state of the domain (if any) it is protecting.
I turned off auto-renew on the rest of my domains, but it was painful. I couldn't help but feel that Namecheap had an agenda out to milk money out of their WhoisGuard customers.
Unlike domains, there was no real way to manage the rest of the 23 WhoisGuard subscriptions I had left without clicking on each subscription individually.
Namecheap's site is awfully slow most of the time. Turning off auto-renewal for your WhoisGuard subscriptions is a 40 minute task.
Great! Just what I needed.