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Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

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Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#121

Post by baobabKoodaa »

greg-m wrote: post #108

Hey folks - Greg here, I do product at Blacksmith. I want to say upfront - we've never pursued these invoices. If someone feels they didn't get value from the service, we've eaten that cost and always will. There's a bit of an implicit policy decision on our side here that we did a bad job of communicating - I want to clarify that, and then talk about how we can fix it. First, we wanted to let customers start using B…

The main issue is that you deceptively communicated what happens at the end of the free trial. You decided to use the wording "disruption", which implies that workloads will be stopped, which is the opposite of what happened. This is deceptive and predatory. I will never use your software and after this happened I am AMAZED that anybody else (particularly OP, but also anybody who read this post) will continue to trust you with their workloads. The way I look at this is: if you're willing to do deceptive and predatory billing, why wouldn't you be also willing to sell access to intelligence agencies or some other "grey area" party who wants to do supply chain hacks?

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#122

Post by ashkulz »

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?

We used to have self-hosted runners on Hetzner dedicated servers, and we migrated to UbiCloud ~6 months ago.

Unless you can optimise your CI runtime to be very balanced and fast, you're going to have a lot of jobs queued during working hours ... although it costs more per minute, the fact that CI jobs are bursty means it works out not too much costlier but with less queue time.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#123

Post by inigyou »

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…

There are, in fact, absolutely no US-imposed rules about how a country manages its ccTLD like there are on gTLDs (words).

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#124

Post by inigyou »

zarzavat wrote: post #118
noja wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

It's both. It's normal business practice in the German-speaking countries (a.k.a. DACH) that would be considered a scam anywhere else.

Basically, in most countries paying money is something that requires continuous enthusiastic consent - if you don't pay, that's the business's problem and they should stop serving you, and they may only recover payment for goods they've already given you and not received payment for. But in DACH, it only requires technical consent - if you signed something saying you'll give them money, then you have to give them that money, and you cannot rescind your obligation to pay, except as provided in the contract or an overriding law.

You went to Austria and did Austrian business with an Austrian company, you should be aware that Austrian rules and norms apply. ccTLDs are not generic, every country is free to apply any rules on their ccTLD!

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#125

Post by inigyou »

kelnos wrote: post #30

That's incredibly scummy. Article author estimates that "only" 5% of people would expect this outcome for a "try for free", "no credit card required" service, but I think that number is well below 1%. Can't believe they continued using the service after this. I would refuse to pay (they have no legal basis to require payment, and their own terms of service seems to disagree with their behavior) and find a more ethica…

Only the no credit card part is surprising. Something like AWS will bill you for everything not within the free tier and expect YOU to keep track of what's in the free tier. But they ask for your CC upfront.

It's not illegal or even unethical to bill someone who hasn't given their CC, but it's definitely unexpected.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#127

Post by inigyou »

Hikikomori wrote: post #76
yowo wrote: post #66

Unpleaseant experience and all, but sounds like complaining about not reading the full terms and then being shocked after the first bill, which is ok if you are buying a personal service, but that's a no-no in business. The argument of "like many early startup do, we oversaw this and ignored that" doesn't really make it better.

Why would it be ok if you're buying a personal service?

Most countries have consumer protection laws, but they're only for consumers, due to the usual power imbalance. Power is expected to be balanced in B2B transactions - your lawyers spent as much time ensuring you weren't scammed as theirs spent trying to scam you - so there's no protection law about that. You get whatever the contract says you get.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#128

Post by inigyou »

mystraline wrote: post #84

So ive done this before when I deal with predatory and 'free trial' companies. Go get a $20 gas station credit card. They get THAT card, and whatever name you want to provide. When they demand $x000 for their free trial, they get.... $20! And before anyone bemoans their 50+ page onesided "contract" that weasel-words revokes 'free trial'... Sure, they can publish a claim and sell off a debt to "John Q Public". We can…

If they can prove you agreed to the charges, they can follow it up with debt collection companies or lawsuits, and that will cost you a lot more than just paying what you agreed to pay.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#129

Post by justinclift »

ashkulz wrote: post #122
justinclift wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We used to have self-hosted runners on Hetzner dedicated servers, and we migrated to UbiCloud ~6 months ago. Unless you can optimise your CI runtime to be very balanced and fast, you're going to have a lot of jobs queued during working hours ... although it costs more per minute, the fact that CI jobs are bursty means it works out not too much costlier but with less queue time.

Oh good point. Hadn't thought of the bursty nature of the load.

Sounds like you need to share infra with an org of similar needs in a vastly different timezone.

I guess that's what SaaS CI solutions are in a way. :)

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#130

Post by inigyou »

scared_together wrote: post #2

How exactly would BlackSmith enforce the overdue payment? By sending the user to court?

They could if they feel it's worthwhile. Most companies don't, but most companies don't do most of the stuff mentioned in this article, because they're lazy. If they're not lazy they can absolutely follow up any unpaid debt in court, no matter whether you tried to use a virtual credit card or anything like that.

In German-speaking (DACH) countries the companies aren't lazy and they will take you to court and the court will make you pay all legal and court fees as well as the debt. It's a near certainty they will bother. In the USA you're hoping they won't bother and they'll be satisfied with just banning you as a customer. I think this is because each party pays their own legal fees in the USA.

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