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Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

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Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#181

Post by [deleted] »

emacdona wrote: post #157
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 i…

[deleted]

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#182

Post by greg-m »

Arcuru wrote: post #158
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.

I'd push back a little, the whole problem is that our flow let someone get to a surprising bill without it being obvious along the way.

Looking back at support cases we have typically seen this at much lower spend too, so it's definitely a clarity issue that we will fix.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#183

Post by rafram »

inigyou wrote: post #176
rafram wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any actual evidence that the US government has control over ICANN? I know they used to have an agreement that gave the US some oversight, but as far as I know that ended a decade ago.

ICANN exists in the US, therefore the US government has control over it.

It's pretty difficult for the US government to tell a nonprofit what to do.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#184

Post by rcleveng »

tristor wrote: post #179
rcleveng wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens with me every year with Barnes and Noble bookstore. I canceled their annual membership back in like 2018, Starting in 2021 this zombie account started charging me for a renewal. I reached out to support and they disavowed any knowledge of how this could happen, had no record of charging me, and no clue how it could have happened. Since Amex is nice about allowing someone who charged you in the past - kee…

I have this exact same thing happening with B&N. Did you ever figure out how to get it to stop?

I have not unfortunately, and spent several hours trying to get it sorted out -- all unsuccessfully.

I do a chargeback every year.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#185

Post by inigyou »

rafram wrote: post #183
inigyou wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ICANN exists in the US, therefore the US government has control over it.

It's pretty difficult for the US government to tell a nonprofit what to do.

It's actually extremely easy. They send a couple big guys with uniforms and badges and guns to your house, and they say, do this or else.

Why did you think Let's Encrypt suddenly blocked Iran? It isn't because their board members have the same ideological alignment.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#186

Post by QuantumGood »

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-...

Had a tiny (Several months later, I learned at that time, that they had instituted a standing stop payment order to the merchant we were paying, but only in the amount of exactly $600. Fast forward, we make a $600 payment, get a notification that it went through, no notification of stop payment, but later a notification from the merchant we were trying to pay (Synchrony - Amazon Store Card) stating they were closing our account due to the stop payment.

Meet in person with a bank rep. They have trouble finding the problem, but once found, argue that we must have requested this specifically, for they would never have done such a thing. I didn't even know a standing stop payment for a specific amount was a thing, asked what is normal policy, what bank terminonlogy would cause such a thing. Would not give any answer other than "you must have asked for it". What would I have said? "You must have asked for it" etc.

Currently fighting with the bank for audio of the phone call where they claim we requested this, and with Synchrony telling them it is the bank's fault. We immediately paid balance on closed Synchrony account, and had made ~12 payments successfully before the inadvertent stop payment.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#187

Post by esafak »

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…

Also note that managing self-hosted runners with Kubernetes is no walk in the park.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#188

Post by _pdp_ »

esafak wrote: post #187
arusahni wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Also note that managing self-hosted runners with Kubernetes is no walk in the park.

Haha, we don't use Kubernetes. It is a single large server with plenty of space for runners. It is as simple and boring as it gets. The only fun part is that we use Firecracker for the actual runners. It is provides nice isolation and it is very easy to work with.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#189

Post by nanoai »

cycomanic wrote: post #55

Can someone explain this statements: > While amusingly as of June 8 Blacksmith’s terms implied that their right to bill you is contingent on you providing payment information, a SaaS app certainly could have terms that obligate users to pay for unexpected overage when on a free trial. > And let’s be clear: our agents run a lot of CI jobs, so we did expect to hit the limits of the free plan. We used the service and go…

[flagged]

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#190

Post by greg-m »

emacdona wrote: post #157
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 i…

Thank you for engaging!

Yeah, I hear you on the inversion of expectations and I think you're exactly right about how this affects perceptions of the product.

Candidly, right now, we're more likely to land on an opt-out rather than opt-in here since getting your builds to actually run again requires a code change. I think there's a full blog post to write about why we think this is the right default, but we're still thinking it through.

Regardless, we need to make the choice loud and visible, and our miss was making it too hidden. We'll close that gap.

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