This in part describes my experience and mirrors the experience of another contributor to the Community forum who wrote back in 3/05/2012, after being informed that a Norton 360 v.5, 1 yr. subscription renewal would cost $79.95 under enrollment in the "Norton Automatic Renewal Service". The service includes Norton automatically charging a person's credit/debit card. Even if the client subscriber does "turn off" this feature by accessing his Norton account online and renews "manually", the price would not change unless ...and here things get murky. As a prelude, I can say I'm satisfied with the Norton 360 performance I have.
First, it is not made clearly known that during a subscriber's purchase of a "product" at Norton.com (for example, subscription renewal) he is likely enrolled, automatically so-to-speak, in the Norton Automatic Renewal Service ...it is not presented as an option at that transaction. The option allowed to you is to have to go to myNortonAccount.com to turn off that feature. In other words, read and heed the fine print. Personally, I think this billing/pricing device is unfriendly and misleading.
Secondly, this whole nebulous area of resellers, retailers, promotions, rebates, coupons, discounts, etc. relative to pricing of Norton products and its own pricing of them is a cautionary tale of "buyer beware", unless one believes this is 100% proof that Free Enterprise unequivocally benefits consumers. Speaking only for myself, all the time I spent on the computer doing so many searches to find a fair (reasonable?) price to renew my Norton 360 subscription was almost not worth it.
Which leads me to conclude, as follows:
1) Original price of Norton 360, v.4 (boxed) purchased at Staples 2010 - $39 (on sale);
2) 1 yr. subscription renewal price of it purchased at Norton.com in 2011 - $19.95 (v.5 stated on invoice);
*3) 1 yr. subscription renewal price of it purchased at Norton.com in 2012 - $37., plus tax (discounted at Customer Support)
*Note: it took three tries attempting to find out , via Norton.com Support, why the extraordinary increase in price for a 1yr. subscription renewal to use Norton 360, version 5 which had been updated frequently in the past. One of those was a "chat" session with Nathan in Customer Support who turned out to be a "virtual agent", i.e. not a real person. Time to laugh?
During the last attempt, it was a real person to chat with and he suggested a discounted price of $37. I agreed to it, and less than an hour later the billing transaction for that price, plus tax, was completed today. An invoice was emailed showing this.