Ah, too risky to try for small operators. Good to know. Thanks for the fair warning.
Surprise, pay $1000
11–20 of 234 posts
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#12WoW. That's certainly a surprise to me. I'd never expect an invoice after not putting in a card. I also believe this is totally just a case of "billing and metering is hard, and may actually be a larger engineering effort than your actual service". I was just looking at them earlier today since our Github actions are slow AF, and while they sounds great, this tells me it'll cost me more time to make sure I babysit it…
Founder of Depot [0] here. Feel free to try us out. We have a real free trial that is time based that doesn’t do odd things like this. Also have usage limits that you can put in place to further clamp down on runaway surprises.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#13> In order to use the Blacksmith Software Inc Service, You must set up an account. During the account setup process, You will be required to connect your GitHub account and install Blacksmith’s GitHub integration in your org, and add a valid payment method, such as a credit card, which will be processed through Stripe. Alternatively, for larger contracts, You may request to be billed via invoice.
> By providing payment information, You authorize us to charge Your credit card for usage fees or, in the case of invoice-based contracts, agree to make timely payments as specified in the invoicing terms.
Unless this guy had a larger contract and requested to be billed via invoice, this is a violation of terms and he should tell them to stuff it.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#14Infisical does this too. They don't make it clear that they charge you for projects and machine identities upfront, and then you get slammed with a $800 bill on your first month.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#15Blacksmith are wrong, but also they’re a YC company- they may be young founders that haven’t run a SaaS before and genuinely don’t know how to handle free trials.
Doesn't take a genius to figure this one out. If you can't understand this before it becomes a problem, you have no place running a SaaS business.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#16I can see their logic - instead of breaking people's builds, they are being the nice guys and letting you pay them back later. BUT, any time you break convention, you've dipped into your trust budget (even if you communicate it way more clearly than was apparently done here.)
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#17This doesn't seem like the right way to do business long terms. The off chance that someone actually take you up on it and pay your 'bill', you've destroyed a lot of goodwill and alerted the rest of the tech world of your scammy moves.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#18How exactly would BlackSmith enforce the overdue payment? By sending the user to court?
Yes, civil legal proceedings (and/or hiring a collections agency) are generally how debts are pursued in the United States.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#19BlackSmith should get in this thread and explain themselves.
Also, can the author tell us how much this would have cost on GH actions?
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#20tl;dr:
"Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it."
It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards.
You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger.
And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it valuable.
You have two choices. Pay up to keep using it, or stop.
The fact that you decided to pay up to keep using it is actually, imo, a pretty good advertisement for the service.