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FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid

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Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid

#111

Post by tinus_hn »

Beltalowda wrote: post #75
tyrfing wrote: post #6

Absolutely absurd. I haven't touched it for 13 years, and just received an email that they will be billing me $31.25 with 6 hours warning. This, of course, is a few hours after an email saying that my "free subscription" will be expiring in a month, not within hours. The kicker is that the billing FAQ 404s, the "account URL" 500s, and there is no apparent way to log in to the account that they are billing me for. At…

I'd just ignore it out of principle. They won't have a CC on file and I never agreed to these terms. Good luck collecting since what they're doing isn't legal in pretty much any jurisdiction, and I reject the idea that I need to take action to not be billed.

It may or may not be defensible but chances are the terms of service you agreed to included a phrase that states they can make changes to those terms and you have to review them periodically or you’ll be deemed to have accepted them.

Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid

#112

Post by GnarfGnarf »

dccoolgai wrote: post #71
codeflo wrote: post #32

I got that e-mail too, on a decade-old test account: first an e-mail that reads like my account simply "expires" if I don't update. Then an invoice. Here's what I don't get: After a stunt like this, any reputation/brand value that you might have had is gone. So, the obvious conclusion is they bought the company purely to pull this trick. Any other value the company might have had is deleted. Can that have been worth…

Someone once told me that as recently as the late 2010s AOL was making millions of revenue off of old dialup accounts from the 90s that people just never cancelled and the cards just kept running. That's what they're probably shooting for here.

The expiry date of the credit card needs to be updated every couple of years. How can AOL keep charging a credit card if they don't have current information for it?

Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid

#113

Post by detaro »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #112
dccoolgai wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once told me that as recently as the late 2010s AOL was making millions of revenue off of old dialup accounts from the 90s that people just never cancelled and the cards just kept running. That's what they're probably shooting for here.

The expiry date of the credit card needs to be updated every couple of years. How can AOL keep charging a credit card if they don't have current information for it?

Credit card information is often automatically updated, the CC networks have services for that.

Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid

#114

Post by jobman »

heartbreak wrote: post #94
Rexxar wrote: post #68

If I had created such a company and I couldn't work on it any more, I would prefer to close it completely than to sell it to crooks like that.

And in that way, it does reflect poorly on Joel and the Fog Creek folks.

I'm a former FC employee who was around when the acquisition went down. It was definitely a drama at the time. One could possibly even say a debacle. But to be fair to Joel, he had long moved on from the company and was focused on Stack Overflow. The new (at the time) CEO of the company is a merciless, self-absorbed jerk who couldn't care less about the product, its customers, or the employees who got sold along with the product.

Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid

#115

Post by antifa »

tinus_hn wrote: post #111
Beltalowda wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd just ignore it out of principle. They won't have a CC on file and I never agreed to these terms. Good luck collecting since what they're doing isn't legal in pretty much any jurisdiction, and I reject the idea that I need to take action to not be billed.

It may or may not be defensible but chances are the terms of service you agreed to included a phrase that states they can make changes to those terms and you have to review them periodically or you’ll be deemed to have accepted them.

Luckily we live in "law is law" land and not "contract is law" land, and the law does take kindly to concepts like hotswapping concepts in a predatory manor.

Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid

#116

Post by Ferret7446 »

tehnicaorg wrote: post #109

Their answer: Dear , Thank you for contacting FogBugz Support. I understand that you have received a billing notice and do not want to be charged. You may be wondering why you have received this communication and wish to have your account deleted. In the first place, please be rest assured that you will not be charged unless you have added a valid payment method to your account. The notification you have received is…

So it sounds like grand incompetence rather than malice. Probably their automated mailer does not check whether the account is disabled or not. A junior dev is going to have a bad day.

Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid

#117

Post by anildash »

tyrfing wrote: post #6

Absolutely absurd. I haven't touched it for 13 years, and just received an email that they will be billing me $31.25 with 6 hours warning. This, of course, is a few hours after an email saying that my "free subscription" will be expiring in a month, not within hours. The kicker is that the billing FAQ 404s, the "account URL" 500s, and there is no apparent way to log in to the account that they are billing me for. At…

It’s a terrible move, and everyone should ignore the email. (Obviously, not legal advice, just my personal opinion.)

I don’t recommend anyone do business with them, whether as a customer or anything else; I was CEO of Fog Creek when we decided to sell FogBugz, and if I knew the difference between what we were told ahead of the deal and what happened after, I never would have approved it. I didn’t see that they’d done this latest shitty thing until now but I really lament that they’ve sunk to an even lower new level.

Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid

#118

Post by tablespoon »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #103
lioeters wrote: post #4

Great way to ruin the FogBugz brand and reputation: move everyone from free to paid tier without consent, and send out emails with a short notice telling them they will be charged $30/month - when most of these users haven't heard from/of them in over a decade. The flood of complaints is hilarious. https://twitter.com/search?q=fogbugz&src=typed_query

FogBugz got bought out by a vulture capital style firm that fired everyone and outsourced everything. They're going to extract as much value as they can. The reputation doesn't matter if they can sucker enough people into paying for it.

> FogBugz got bought out by a vulture capital style firm that fired everyone and outsourced everything. They're going to extract as much value as they can. The reputation doesn't matter if they can sucker enough people into paying for it.

As I understanding, that's a the strategy of a lot of private equity: burn goodwill and turn it into cash.

Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid

#119

Post by elkos »

detaro wrote: post #113
GnarfGnarf wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The expiry date of the credit card needs to be updated every couple of years. How can AOL keep charging a credit card if they don't have current information for it?

Credit card information is often automatically updated, the CC networks have services for that.

Are you sure this is a thing in other countries too? I think Visa and MasterCards issued in EU don't get auto-updated.

Re: FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid

#120

Post by abeyer »

fuzzythinker wrote: post #8
tyrfing wrote: post #6

Absolutely absurd. I haven't touched it for 13 years, and just received an email that they will be billing me $31.25 with 6 hours warning. This, of course, is a few hours after an email saying that my "free subscription" will be expiring in a month, not within hours. The kicker is that the billing FAQ 404s, the "account URL" 500s, and there is no apparent way to log in to the account that they are billing me for. At…

Same here. It's was probably around 13 years as well, probably to try it out and never touched it since. My "account URL" shows 500 error as well. Here's the almost empty auto-reply if you reply to the email: Hi, Please reach out to the Fogbugz support team by visiting the following portal; https://support.fogbugz.com/hc/en-us/ Thank you, Fogbugz team.

If you poke around in the support articles they mention the cause of this: they also deleted all idle accounts without notice and depending on when you got hit by that, might not even be able to recover it. So they're trying to bill you for a service that they can't even provide.
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