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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

#101

Post by criddell »

josho wrote: post #64
j16sdiz wrote: post #53

Let them charge you and file a chargeback on the credit card . With enough chargeback, they will have their account suspended.

I think they are smart enough to avoid that. They’ll probably send invoices and some small percent may voluntarily pay to just make it stop quickly. Others will ignore, but their amount due will accumulate to a point that this company will be able to sell those accounts to debt collectors.

I got the "invoice" as well.

They don't have any payment method for me, so I assume they will let the invoice sit for 90 days, then send it to collections.

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

#102

Post by krallja »

jrpelkonen wrote: post #95
cobertos wrote: post #52

> IgniteTech - Where software goes to live[0] Thats from the new owners website. What a dystopian tagline for your company. Then there's just a whole catalog of their dead software in a list too. [0]: https://ignitetech.com/

By removing just three letters you get “initech”. Coincidence? I think not.

Wasn't Initech acquired by Intertrode, or was it the other way around?

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

#103

Post by kevin_b_er »

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.

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

#104

Post by alexjplant »

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'm more concerned about them affecting my credit score... these clowns haven't a legal or moral leg to stand on but there's no way to cancel the free account that I haven't touched for 7 years. The hyperlink to my instance 500s and their support portal is either broken or disallowing new user registrations (despite me trying three browsers, two devices, and spending 10 minutes in the dev console manually enabling various buttons for password setting on the new account page and trying their ZenDesk URL instead of the custom one). Any emails to their customer success address tell users to log into this nonfunctional support portal.

Me writing this post is 10% commiseration and 90% documentation for if I have to talk to a court or credit bureau.

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

#106

Post by HillRat »

Seems like they (A) are killing the free tier and forcing active users to upgrade to paid plans; and (B) screwed up and also sent out emails to users who have been inactive and had their accounts deactivated (thus accounting for the flood of angry people who have gotten demand letters for a site that's throwing 500 errors for them).

So, total fuckup on their part. While it's not out of bounds for them to phase out the free tier, doing so with basically no notice to those active users, and then also accidentally spamming the (at a guess) 95+% of users who once signed up for FogBugz and then never touched it again ... not great, Bob. Not great. Hope their acquisition price didn't assume the ability to convert those free tier users to paid, because I doubt many are willing to stick around given the way this was handled.

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

#107

Post by stjohnswarts »

m4tthumphrey wrote: post #15

To play devils advocate, is this not just an exercise to remove stale accounts? It looks like everyone who received the email does not have a payment method on their account so it seems more like "If you don't add a payment method to your account we'll be closing it?" No?

If you want to remove stale accounts, then send a 60-day warning and then delete the accounts. Don't try to act like fly-by-night scam artist and demand money for something you're not owed.

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

#108

Post by gubby »

kevincox wrote: post #54
dtgriscom wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably legal to send messages like this, just like it's legal for ski slopes to have "We aren't at fault for anything" statements on every ticket. It's when they tried to enforce it that they'd find the law wasn't on their side.

It should be illegal to make claims that you know are not legally valid. Of course this would be a horrible rule to enforce between the "the contract changes weren't run by legal" and "that line is enforceable in this outher jurisdiction that we operate in". But scaring average consumers with a massive contract and a line at the end "even if part of this contract is unenforceable the remaining clauses apply" is just…

Very often with contract law there is mostly no such thing as 'knowing a claim is not legally valid'. A lot of contract law is established by precedent, meaning in those cases nobody including the judge knew the enforceability of the issue before the judgement was written. Cases are also rarely identical examples of previous cases, meaning there can be an element of precedent setting even in cases that seem routine.

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

#109

Post by tehnicaorg »

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 due to the recent changes to the FogBugz Base Subscription Model. Please accept our apologies for any misunderstanding this may have caused.

  Additionally, be aware that your subscription will be automatically canceled and scheduled for deletion 30 days after the current billing period unless you add a valid payment method.

  Finally, please be aware that trial accounts that were not active for a period of 9 months are automatically disabled, and will result in an Error 500 if you try to access the URL. These customers may have still received a notification despite not having an active account or a configured payment method.

  Since there is no further action required from our end at this time, we will be marking this ticket as solved. That said, if still you have any other questions or concerns with which we may assist, please let us know, and we will be happy to help as required.

  Thank you.

  Best regards,
  
  FogBugz Support Team
I had a hard time logging in to get in contact with them. My fogbugz link (for which I should pay) returned 500 Internal Server Error, logging in Firefox didn't work, in Chrome it said that the password in invalid, and I didn't get a reset e-mail (tried twice), I've logged with Google credentials but I got a "This page doesn't exist" on a central-supportdesk.zendesk.com page.

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

#110

Post by kevincox »

gubby wrote: post #108
kevincox wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be illegal to make claims that you know are not legally valid. Of course this would be a horrible rule to enforce between the "the contract changes weren't run by legal" and "that line is enforceable in this outher jurisdiction that we operate in". But scaring average consumers with a massive contract and a line at the end "even if part of this contract is unenforceable the remaining clauses apply" is just…

Very often with contract law there is mostly no such thing as 'knowing a claim is not legally valid'. A lot of contract law is established by precedent, meaning in those cases nobody including the judge knew the enforceability of the issue before the judgement was written. Cases are also rarely identical examples of previous cases, meaning there can be an element of precedent setting even in cases that seem routine.

Yes. In those cases it is fine.

I don't think it should be illegal to have unenforceable clauses. Just ones that are known to be unenforceable. For example look at your average ISP out TV provider contract and there are a handful of these designed to prey on the public that doesn't know better.

It would definitely be difficult and messy to enforce, quite likely to messy to be feasible, but I would like to see some rule like this passed.

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