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Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

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Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#21

Post by dheera »

keyle wrote: post #17

This doesn't seem like the right way to do business long terms. The off chance that someone actually take you up on it and pay your 'bill', you've destroyed a lot of goodwill and alerted the rest of the tech world of your scammy moves.

Also for those that require a credit card for a free trial, I always use a virtual card and cancel it. It's super fun to watch them cry when they can't actually charge you.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#23

Post by MrAlex94 »

> This question is for us: will we keep using Blacksmith, despite them giving us an unpleasant surprise and a prickly support exchange?

Well, there are other drop-in GHA runner services, so I wouldn’t see why anyone would be tied into a specific provider.

Namespace.so are one and my experience with their support has been incredibly positive. Great team there.

Honourable mention to WarpBuild as well, who I used before them.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#24

Post by zarzavat »

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 assumptions, and assumptions can be used to scam people.

In general there's two types of businesses: businesses where you pre-pay (e.g. McDonalds), and businesses where you post-pay (e.g. a sit-down restaurant). If you take a conventionally pre-pay service and apply post-pay pricing to it, you have yourself a perfect scam.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1bnjus/the_austri...

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#28

Post by usernametaken29 »

This reminds me of OpenAI which allows you to overcommit on prepaid tokens and then tries to force you into paying overpaid charges. Only they really can’t. You can’t make someone pay for a service they didn’t agree to with billing that doesn’t exist. I wish OpenAI best of luck with their shenanigans

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#29

Post by protocolture »

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 by a massive class action, that I was tangentially a beneficiary of, not because of the minutes claim, which was standard practice, but because they had failed to provide anyone with the cost of the data.

I think I paid them 300 bucks or something in the end. After further letting a 600 dollar agreement go to collections and settling with collections for 50%.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#30

Post by kelnos »

That's incredibly scummy. Article author estimates that "only" 5% of people would expect this outcome for a "try for free", "no credit card required" service, but I think that number is well below 1%.

Can't believe they continued using the service after this. I would refuse to pay (they have no legal basis to require payment, and their own terms of service seems to disagree with their behavior) and find a more ethical provider.

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