61–70 of 234 posts
This reminds me of the business practices of the Austrian NIC. Usually domain names expire if you don't renew them. In Austria, unless you explicitly cancel the domain name by fax, they just roll the registration over to the next year and then send you to collections[1] if you don't pay up. There's no rule that domain names expire unless you renew them, at least for ccTLDs. It's just a convention. Conventions lead to…
Years 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 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.
Also for those that require a credit card for a free trial, I always use a virtual card and cancel it. It's super fun to watch them cry when they can't actually charge you.
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.
Interesting question, and I think it makes sense they’ve chosen to be pragmatic.
However, I wonder if Blacksmith get bitten in the arse by this. Hopefully that changes their behaviour but, like many startups, they might simply fail.
So I suppose the trick becomes to keep using the service without getting locked into it until it becomes clearer whether they will succeed or not, then perhaps you can consider taking advantage of platform features.
Even then, I don’t know how much I trust Blacksmith or would want to make it hard for myself to move away from them.
And on GitHub actions: Microsoft are very good at owning the platform and then making products and features that are just useful enough that it’s not worth switching to a better alternative but absolutely no more. GitHub Actions is an obvious example, Teams is another, but the list is long. To me it reads as a more modern variant of the anticompetitive behaviour of the 1990s. It sets up enough of a barrier to keep others out, and kills innovation. I’m not a fan.
The argument of "like many early startup do, we oversaw this and ignored that" doesn't really make it better.
This reminds me of the business practices of the Austrian NIC. Usually domain names expire if you don't renew them. In Austria, unless you explicitly cancel the domain name by fax, they just roll the registration over to the next year and then send you to collections[1] if you don't pay up. There's no rule that domain names expire unless you renew them, at least for ccTLDs. It's just a convention. Conventions lead to…
This 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
Years 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…
Data was counted as minutes back then for you? I only remember kB and MB costs...