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Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

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Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#151

Post by mtVessel »

wielebny wrote: post #60

That's a typical discrepancy between how US and EU sees civil agreements. In Europe it's perfectly normal to be bound by terms of a paid service. I would never expect to avoid being liable for payments for services rendered only because I didn’t enter a cc number before exceeding free-tier limits. Even in the comments below people are stating that this bill is valid only if they want to continue using the service.

I dunno. I'm in the US and I feel that those saying they wouldn't expect to be liable for services they consume beyond free tier limits sound awfully entitled.

I mean, it's a sleazy practice, especially considering how they word their emails, but I wouldn't expect something for nothing just because I hadn't set up a billing mechanism yet.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#152

Post by tonnydourado »

Terr_ wrote: post #59
ErigmolCt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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-...

When one of my sisters got her first paycheck from her first real job, she didn't knew much about banking, and thought that the overdraft limit on the ATM was her actual salary, so she just withdrew the whole thing. I think it took over a year, maybe two, to pay it all back.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#153

Post by SoftTalker »

ipsento606 wrote: post #147
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.

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 1…

Normally means that if your checking accout balance hits zero, they will pull from your savings account rather than returning a check presented for payment. They may (probably will) still charge you a fee when this happens, but it might be less than an overdraft.

Or, it might be a case where they grant you a short-term personal loan to cover the overdraft (up to some limit) rather than return checks. Again there will be fees and interest on this.

In either case, since they are not rejecting payments, you avoid getting hit with fees from whomever you wrote the check to. So your only fees/penalties are paid to the bank.

Of course the best answer is just keep better track of your checking account balance.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#154

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

A certain number of businesses will just pay an invoice if it looks real and has a business justification. There are scams around this, but also vendors who may be taking advantage of this. If 30% of customers will just start paying the invoices, it's worth it to them to deal with the questions from the rest of them. At least until reputational damage starts.

A very simple example of a scam that's probably happened to you if you own a domain name: as the expiration date approaches you'll get "invoices" from companies for domain name renewal charges. If you read the fine print it will say "this is a solicition for business" but otherwise it looks just like an invoice. Some people will just pay them.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#155

Post by zamalek »

$1000 in a month? What on earth are you doing in CI? We're on Warp build (50% cheaper instead of 33%) with 6 people hitting it pretty hard across a few repos and only reach $150/mo. That's with building rust - a worse case than anything you're using for build time.

1. I'm not sure if blacksmith offers larger runners, but you if you're using them you have checked that bigger runners are worth the squeeze? A 2x runner does not mean a 2x faster build - I had a goal and sized CI according to that.

2. Caching. Nx can do this for your TS, provided your code is decomposed into packages.

3. At a previous job I had a post-run timings job. GH markdown supports Mermaid; I used a gannt chart to express it. I don't remember if the GH api supports getting timing for the current wf - so it may have been a second workflow.

The first is just a little legwork, the rest your agent should be able to do in 5 minutes.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#156

Post by js2 »

beaylott wrote: post #53

If you want a 'fixed' cost option for GitHub self hosted runners on your AWS I can't recommend https://runs-on.com/ enough.

A couple caveats. Doesn't support EC2 Macs, so you can't use this to build iOS apps. (Understandably. EC2 Macs are a pain to support and can't reasonably be scaled elastically due to a combination of Apple licensing restrictions and Mac hardware being totally unsuitable to the datacenter.) Also, this is a EU company which may be a problem for US-based customers.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#157

Post by emacdona »

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…

I appreciate you stepping in and clarifying. Thank you.

But honestly, this feels like damage control. This is (to me) clearly an innovation on a dark pattern that is basically just "accepted practice" nowadays, namely the "subscribe by default; make it hard to opt-out of said subscription at signup time".

That's why I think people are upset about this. By not taking a credit card, you made it feel like it wasn't an implementation of that dark pattern (yay!) -- however, secretly, it was!

If the intent is to be customer friendly, it's so perfectly clear to me what the answer is. OPT-IN. In other words, a checkbox:

"By default, when your free credits are consumed, all of your runners will be de-provisioned. Instead, if you would prefer that your runners continue working, check this box and we will invoice you for usage in excess of your free credits."

But honestly, you did more than I expect of most service providers today. You sent an email; you actually told them how many credits were left in the free tier. AWS, for example, can only give me an _estimate_ of how much cost I've accrued. They can make no promises about the rate at which I'm expected to accrue new costs. And, unless I've taken great care (by, say, terraforming every resource in a given AWS account), "turning off my cost accruing services" is not a simple matter. If I understood the article correctly, there was, at least, a "single action" they could have taken to immediately stop accruing costs.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#158

Post by Arcuru »

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…

I'm not so sure that Blacksmith is making the right choice around how to handle this signup flow, but I have very little sympathy for the person in this post. $1000 in CI is a lot of usage.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#159

Post by inigyou »

amarant wrote: post #149
inigyou wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ser…

Ms = Microsoft?

Being unable to tell how to cancel something is a different thing. You can contact their support. If they don't have support, or the support refuses, then you contact your bank, with evidence, because it's now an unauthorized payment.

This is separate from the cultural norm that you can only cancel with a certain notice period or by fax.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#160

Post by kmoser »

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…

> I want to say upfront - we've never pursued these invoices.

At first glance that sounds admirable, but the flipside is that it implies Blacksmith knows they're being shady: if you know you're not going to pursue it, why did you invoice the customer in the first place? This sounds less like you're forgiving a charity case and more like you're waiving an invoice because the customer identified it as unethical to begin with.

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