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Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

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Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#141

Post by inigyou »

zephen wrote: post #136
inigyou wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's incromulent about suing people who racked up debts to you?

If you read the other comments, you're certainly an outlier in this belief. 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 inter…

I find that exploiting a difference between expectations and reality is a common way to make money, but I'm no good at it myself. I'm cursed with engineer-brain instead of business-brain.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#142

Post by dspillett »

soco wrote: post #62
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…

Data was counted as minutes back then for you? I only remember kB and MB costs...

Very early on, mobile data was essentially an emulation of an analogue modem call, at blazing fast rates like 19200baud or less, held over the same channels as voice calls with a bit of extra jiggery-pokery, and were charged by the minutes just like voice calls. Sometimes they were charged as normal voice calls, sometimes you ended up being charged extra (or not being charged extra as such, but with data calls not being counted in any pre-paid minute allowance your plan had). It was vitally important to check this before making modem calls, as some providers charged data calls in the same band as premium rate voice calls, meaning that just picking up a few text emails could be quite expensive.

[cue misty eyed memories of trying to get my Psion 5mx to connect to the Internet by infra-red serial link to my phone, to try get updated connection information for my next train as the one I was on was going to be too late to make the planned connection…]

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#143

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#144

Post by madibo3156 »

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…

As a consumer, I can appreciate your focus on support. I get a monthly $0.00 AWS bill on an account I've lost access to. However, because I have no outstanding balance, support is unable to assist me (is their claim). So I enjoy one monthly spam email from them, which I neurotically read in case one month the balance for whatever reason exceeds 0. Still less stressful than trying to resolve the issue with them.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#145

Post by _pdp_ »

arusahni wrote: post #105
_pdp_ wrote: post #101

I am sure Blacksmith is the easy path if you don't want to do any extra work and I am also sure their solution will scale much better as this is what they do full-time. However, I can share what we did to ease on our GitHub Actions bills if it helps. Effectively we have our own runners hooked so that a job is scheduled, a runner picks it up and goes with it. We still use GitHub Actions but our monthly bill is now fla…

> We still use GitHub Actions but our monthly bill is now flat because we pay for a server. Caveat here being that GitHub is exploring charging a usage-based fee for self-hosted GitHub Action runners [1]. While they've halted it for now, it's something worth being aware of as you assess your costs. This is probably a drop in the bucket compared to the order of magnitude savings you've described. [1]: https://github.b…

Thanks. I did not know.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#146

Post by thundergolfer »

> Well, we tried switching back to GitHub Actions, and… yeah it still sucks. Blacksmith has grown explosively because it makes an increasingly frustrating bottleneck in the dev cycle faster.

Where's the "grown explosively" bit coming from? Google doesn't have growth news from 2026, only early 2025.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#147

Post by ipsento606 »

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.

In the US this always seems to be called "overdraft protection", as in "do you want overdraft protection on your account?"

I can never remember if overdraft protection means "we won't let your account overdraft", or "we will let your account overdraft"

It is an incredibly confusing name to me

I could look up the answer now, but I know I will just forget it again. I must have looked it up and then forgotten at least 10 separate times over the years

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#148

Post by etskinner »

Havoc wrote: post #49

Why do people pay for runner saas at all? Theyre not exactly hard to DIY

Presumably they wanted feature parity with Github Actions. If you have lots of workflows already defined in Github Actions DSL, you're not going to want to port them. And even if you do port them, the activities available in the place you port them aren't going to be the same as Github Actions; there won't be feature parity.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#149

Post by amarant »

inigyou wrote: post #124
zarzavat wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

This creates some very uncomfortable cultural clashes sometimes. I remember way back when I was signed up for a service provided by Ms. They did not, as far as I could tell, provide a way to cancel the service, other than to stop paying. Since I had provided them with automatic payments, my bank did not allow me to simply stop paying their invoices, I had to cancel with the provider. I talked to my banks customer service, they refused to help. So I cancelled my account with that bank and moved all the money to a different bank.

Rather more complicated to cancel that service than I would've wished, but hey, I got a better banking service out of the deal, so it's not all bad I guess

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#150

Post by rafram »

inigyou wrote: post #123
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).

By "US-imposed" you presumably mean ICANN-imposed.
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