Skip the middleman, just use AWS with runs-on.com (I'm the developer). Better instance choice, much cheaper, and you can setup an AWS budget alert.
Surprise, pay $1000
51–60 of 234 posts
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#52This reminded me of our experience with Gusto - we signed up to their R&D credit payroll offset service in May last year - their offset fee is calculated as a percentage of the benefit you get. We filed our federal tax return in September, so there naturally wasn't any payroll offsetting until October. They still charged for services they didn't deliver so it was more cash out on day one which really goes against the purpose of the tool. They argued it was in the small print that said "we charge when you sign up" when I ticked a box. I thought that was quite outrageous. I still do.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#53If you want a 'fixed' cost option for GitHub self hosted runners on your AWS I can't recommend https://runs-on.com/ enough.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#54I can understand not wanting to kill someone's CI in the middle of active development, but then the product needs a very explicit consent step before converting free minutes into deb
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#55Can someone explain this statements:
> While amusingly as of June 8 Blacksmith’s terms implied that their right to bill you is contingent on you providing payment information, a SaaS app certainly could have terms that obligate users to pay for unexpected overage when on a free trial.
> And let’s be clear: our agents run a lot of CI jobs, so we did expect to hit the limits of the free plan. We used the service and got value for it. So it’s not inherently dishonest, just surprising. My read is that they can do this.
So I read this that the terms say "blacksmith will only bill you if you provide payment information" but then they say that blacksmith can bill you if you don't provide payment information. That seems to contradict the terms, which I would assume underlie the "contract" that you agree to when agreeing to the terms.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#56Years ago I got my first internet enabled mobile, and the carrier advertised it as having "300 free minutes" as part of the trial period, which is great. So I used 297 minutes of internet services in the first month, but aha actually the minutes only referred to telephony, and I was stung with a ~12,000 dollar overdue mobile internet invoice (360 dollars per megabyte or something equally ludicrous) They got done in b…
This is why I'm pretty sympathetic to hard caps by default
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#57WoW. 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…
This is where the "billing is hard" explanation and the user trust issue overlap
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#58This reminded me of our experience with Gusto - we signed up to their R&D credit payroll offset service in May last year - their offset fee is calculated as a percentage of the benefit you get. We filed our federal tax return in September, so there naturally wasn't any payroll offsetting until October. They still charged for services they didn't deliver so it was more cash out on day one which really goes against the…
Can I ask how much did they charge you? for how long
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#59Years ago I got my first internet enabled mobile, and the carrier advertised it as having "300 free minutes" as part of the trial period, which is great. So I used 297 minutes of internet services in the first month, but aha actually the minutes only referred to telephony, and I was stung with a ~12,000 dollar overdue mobile internet invoice (360 dollars per megabyte or something equally ludicrous) They got done in b…
This is why I'm pretty sympathetic to hard caps by default
That makes me think of bank overdraft fees.
They are another kind of "soft" cap, pitched as an automatic convenience to the customer... But in practice they are too-often deceptive and harmful.
https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/are-banks-the-...
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#60That's a typical discrepancy between how US and EU sees civil agreements.
In Europe it's perfectly normal to be bound by terms of a paid service. I would never expect to avoid being liable for payments for services rendered only because I didn’t enter a cc number before exceeding free-tier limits.
Even in the comments below people are stating that this bill is valid only if they want to continue using the service.