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Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

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Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#111

Post by ElFitz »

ErigmolCt wrote: post #56
protocolture wrote: post #29

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 is why I'm pretty sympathetic to hard caps by default

I love hard caps, and am tired of cloud services not even offering those. May make sense for large companies. Makes no sense for hobbyists and small companies. But maybe that's the point?

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#112

Post by Defletter »

em-bee wrote: post #95
Terr_ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

i always set my overdraft limit to zero. i never want to use that by accident.

It probably depends on the bank, but setting one's overdraft limit to zero doesn't necessarily help and may actually make things worse: some payments may still go through even if you don't have the funds, putting you in unauthorised overdraft, which tends to have a high daily fee.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#113

Post by justinclift »

s3cur3 wrote: post #98

Having been a happy customer of Blacksmith, Depot, and Ubicloud at various points (all three of which offer GitHub Actions runners at cheaper prices than GitHub themselves), I agree the billing here is weird. It's worth pointing out, though, that you have to use a lot of CI minutes to incur a $1000 bill. You're well outside of hobbyist levels, and that same level of usage would have previously cost double from GitHub…

Wonder if they'd be better served $$$ wise to use dedicated servers or similar?

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#115

Post by rcleveng »

Natsu wrote: post #37
greyb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will usually refund you if you end up getting charged because you forgot to cancel. It isn't worth the headache of a chargeback. Plus they have to pay a fee for chargebacks regardless of whether they think it's valid or not, so strong disincentive.

Funny, I got a fraud call recently because CrunchyRoll decided to try to renew a subscription I abandoned years ago and the card they have is expired. I know it wasn't me because I gave up entirely on the service after they changed something about their login systems to reject my password and I could no longer get in. Support wanted me to jump through a lot of hoops and I just refused, choosing instead to just stop d…

This happens with me every year with Barnes and Noble bookstore. I canceled their annual membership back in like 2018, Starting in 2021 this zombie account started charging me for a renewal. I reached out to support and they disavowed any knowledge of how this could happen, had no record of charging me, and no clue how it could have happened.

Since Amex is nice about allowing someone who charged you in the past - keep charging you even as your card has changed, they allow the charge.

Every year I do a chargeback, every year. Amex can't figure out how to not allow it and B&N has no idea why they charge it. Hmmm...

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#116

Post by flexagoon »

Defletter wrote: post #112
em-bee wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i always set my overdraft limit to zero. i never want to use that by accident.

It probably depends on the bank, but setting one's overdraft limit to zero doesn't necessarily help and may actually make things worse: some payments may still go through even if you don't have the funds, putting you in unauthorised overdraft, which tends to have a high daily fee.

That is insane. What's the point of overdraft limit if it doesn't limit your overdraft?

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#117

Post by Lalabadie »

justinclift wrote: post #113
s3cur3 wrote: post #98

Having been a happy customer of Blacksmith, Depot, and Ubicloud at various points (all three of which offer GitHub Actions runners at cheaper prices than GitHub themselves), I agree the billing here is weird. It's worth pointing out, though, that you have to use a lot of CI minutes to incur a $1000 bill. You're well outside of hobbyist levels, and that same level of usage would have previously cost double from GitHub…

Wonder if they'd be better served $$$ wise to use dedicated servers or similar?

Yes, having a performant CI server on premises would probably pay itself in less than three months.

Startups are usually resource-rich and time-poor, and don't want to allocate employee time to infrastructure unless it's core to their business, so arguments for efficient spending there are easily overlooked.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#118

Post by zarzavat »

noja wrote: post #67
zarzavat wrote: post #24

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…

They do that or they did that? (you are linking to a decade old post)

Seems like they still do:

https://www.nic.at/en/how-at-works/domain-holder#id105

> I received a letter from the debt collection agency. What can I do?

> If a domain hasn't been paid for despite several payment reminders from nic.at, the domain shall be locked and the open claim handed over to our debt collection agency. As a result, the invoice must be paid directly to the debt collection agency. Please contact our debt collection agency for more information

Like TFA it's hard to tell if they genuinely believe that they are helping their customers by not discontinuing their service, or if it's a scam. I suspect a mixture of both.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#119

Post by baobabKoodaa »

rcleveng wrote: post #7

WoW. 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…

OpenAI used to do billing like this too.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#120

Post by nailer »

garbagewoman wrote: post #10
nailer wrote: post #5

Blacksmith 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.

Give the growth hackers the benefit of the doubt, you reckon?

Yes. They don't gain much from pissing people off who don't have a card to bill.
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