131–140 of 234 posts
By reading this comment, you agree, etc., etc. ...boilerplate... ...more boilerplate... Terms... and conditions... ...limitations... ...liabilities...
tl;dr: "Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it." It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards. You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger. And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it…
I'm paying $60/mo. for a Kubernetes cluster running Forgejo + Forgejo Actions with plenty of parallel CI runners.
I'd love to see a write up on how you've got this deployed if you have one or are willing to share any repos?
It's Talos Linux on Hetzner VMs where all resources are managed via kubenix, and all CI runners are running NixOS.
So... extremely affordable and extremely performant, but very complicated.
Drop me an email if you want the writeup when I get around to making it.
Until then, here's a Forgejo Actions that compiles its own CI runner image:
https://git.shine.town/infra/runners/src/branch/main/.forgej...
No Docker involved in the build process, it's all Nix.
Unfortunately the CI runner itself is still Docker-in-Docker because:
https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/66#issuecomm...
tl;dr: "Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it." It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards. You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger. And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it…
Billing statements disguised as marketing nudges is a cromulent business practice until the SaaS start sending bills to collections. I think the author is being kind, both to themselves and startup practicing dark patterns. He walks through his own thinking, raises important questions and also gives the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t give. IMHO, the article gets ahead of criticism well: accepting the valid crit…
Well, I should have probably said that instead of sued. But the intent is the same.
> I think the author is being kind, both to themselves and startup practicing dark patterns.
It's unclear it's a dark pattern. The author explicitly states that this particular EULA doesn't allow them to bill without a credit card.
But it's also unclear that this practice will survive the exposure on hacker news.
No, not because it's a "dark pattern" but because it enables customer dark patterns. Run up a bill and then go use something else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data was counted as minutes back then for you? I only remember kB and MB costs...
Last century most people were only sometimes using the Internet. They'd "Go online", if you're young enough not to recognise that noise in Blue Prince when you use the network, that's a "Dial up modem" which is how a typical person would "Go online" in the mid-1990s. So in this regime counting minutes makes some sense. I got a preview of the modern world from about 1996 because my first shared student house (shout ou…
At uni it was fast. So you could actually load images by default.
tl;dr: "Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it." It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards. You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger. And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it…
What's incromulent about suing people who racked up debts to you?
My own answer is that there is nothing (incromulent? uncromulent? well, anyway, not cromulent) about suing people who knowingly and deliberately racked up debts with you, but that common business practices, including the overwhelming abundance of free services everywhere in every product category, and the ability to immediately shut off internet services when you aren't paid, lead to sort of a gestalt of expectations about how things are done.
The article itself says that the terms of service only allow billing if a payment method have been provided, so suing absent that provision would probably be a non-starter anyway.
On the bright? side, suing would definitely keep them on the front page of hacker news longer.
Either say one month free and end after that, or end after the free data amount. If the customer finds value they will sign up and be less likely to look at their credit card bills.
This just pisses people off and puts the cost front and centre so they can't ignore it.
tl;dr: "Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it." It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards. You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger. And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it…
It would be perfectly crumulent if it was explicitly communicated in advance.
1) They intended a bait-and-switch, where they were going to go after everybody for non-payment. According to the article, they might not even have a leg to stand on here.
2) If you take the quote from the company at face value, they realized that their free quota would be insufficient for conversion for some customers, and decided not to shut off services in the middle of evaluation. In this instance, the bill is a communication in advance -- if you provide a credit card in order to keep using our services, we want to get paid for everything you used after the free limit.
Now, you can argue (and many are) about whether this is a good business practice or not, but it really doesn't matter. After making the front page of hacker news, it's probably not one they're going to continue, simply because now that everybody knows about it, you'll probably have a lot of bad actors doing multiple signups, just to siphon off as much token usage as possible.
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 trus…
First off, fair point on the free tier email. This fits in the same theme of clarity vs. trust for me: if we say disruption, but then leave your account enabled, that still feels deceptive even if it seems generous to us. We will fix.
On your last point - I just want to note that this isn't a money-maker for us. Runner bills can be large (as they were here!), and we explicitly wanted to avoid actual charges to the user in favor of not collecting for a good amount of usage. Again, there's a clarity/trust tension there that you're right to call out, but the end goal is that more people can use cheaper, faster runners.
We earn that trust today by being extremely easy to use and delivering on what we promise, and we need to add clarity to that list. Thanks for the feedback.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Internet access used to be billed by the minute back in the Prodigy/Compuserve/AOL days, and early phone plans mirrored that for ease of marketing.
Other way around. The phone plans were billed by the minute. Then came the Internet. In is first generation, Internet was essentially just a long distance call through a modem. Hence it was billed - like the call - by the minute. Dedicated Internet wires came much later, and then the dedicated phone lines were dropped as voip was better quality and cheaper compared to the dedicated lines. While the phone still had a…