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Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

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Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#161

Post by zephen »

inigyou wrote: post #141
zephen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> exploiting a difference between expectations and reality is a common way to make money

Maybe? Or maybe expectations catch up with reality? I mean, does anybody really go into a car dealership thinking the dealer isn't going to do their best to rip them off? Or believe that "their" real estate agent is "on their side?"

I think most people just accept that the world is full of rip-off artists.

Which is kind of sad, really. If one person pushes back on bad billing, the company still makes money, even if it has to do a refund.

But if everybody were to always push back? It wouldn't be worth it to try to tack on extra fees for non-rendered services.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#162

Post by inigyou »

rafram wrote: post #150
inigyou wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes? ICANN is part of the US, and has been strong-armed by the US government into imposing restrictive rules on gTLDs even though they appear like they're global.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#163

Post by inigyou »

close04 wrote: post #82
tialaramex wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The similarity between mobile internet (CSD) and dial-up wasn't really obvious from the users' perspective because they weren't explicitly making a call to access the internet. The session was established transparently when data had to be transferred, and the time this took was charged as minutes. Operators always dreamed of a world built on circuit-switched networks that they fully control instead of packet-switched…

Circuit switching has latency and QoS advantages, but it's definitely not worth the cost for most use cases.

Interestingly, TDM carriers have a latency of approximately one bit per hop and jitter less than that, while any kind of packetized voice such as VoIP has a latency of at least one packet worth of audio, plus one to several packet transmission times per hop, and jitter of several packet transmission times, and packet drop on top of all that. We've actually made quality worse in the name of fitting more services down the same wire, which isn't necessarily bad but it's something to think about.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#165

Post by [deleted] »

dspillett wrote: post #142
soco wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

[deleted]

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#166

Post by inigyou »

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…

Allegedly this is because whenever you have a self-hosted runner, it's actually a Microsoft-hosted runner that is notifying your runner and then polling for it to complete. I wish I was joking.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#167

Post by inigyou »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #121
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 trus…

This whole incident supplied them a lot more publicity. I had never heard of them before today. Since today, I'm more likely to use them, not less, because now I know they exist. I couldn't be less likely than zero.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#168

Post by spogbiper »

SoftTalker wrote: post #154
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 t…

Many years ago I met a woman that ran a "business" that simply invoiced legitimate companies for printer supplies and toner every month. A surprising number of her invoices were paid without question.

That went on for a couple years. Then one day she left town basically in the middle of the night and we never heard from her again.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#169

Post by inigyou »

c7b wrote: post #83

I'm old enough to remember that capitalism used to always feel like this. Even worse. Predatory subscriptions, targeting minors in some cases (remember phone ringtones?), toll numbers, unclear fees, surprise bills (my favorite - roaming fees in your home country because the phone stayed logged into the foreign network after an abroad trip). Silicon Valley/YC style startups felt like a breath of fresh air. Generous re…

It would, and the EU would actually be worse on this. In many if not all EU countries (DACH at the very least) you'd have to pay because you agreed to pay, and you'd have to pay all court and legal fees you caused as well - while in the US the company is more likely to just forget about it and try for another customer.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#170

Post by inigyou »

zephen wrote: post #161
inigyou wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> exploiting a difference between expectations and reality is a common way to make money Maybe? Or maybe expectations catch up with reality? I mean, does anybody really go into a car dealership thinking the dealer isn't going to do their best to rip them off? Or believe that "their" real estate agent is "on their side?" I think most people just accept that the world is full of rip-off artists. Which is kind of sad, r…

Yes, lots of people who don't frequent HN think their real estate agent is on their side, and think car dealerships just sell cars for a fair price. They might even think politicians make laws to make society better.

That's why all these groups of people are able to make so much money. If everyone expected a car dealer to rip them off, car dealers wouldn't be able to rip anyone off and there wouldn't be so many of them.

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