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Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

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Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#201

Post by watermelon0 »

greg-m wrote: post #180
kmoser wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 begi…

Hey there - I partially disagree! We issue an invoice because the customer did consume the services - a lot of folks appreciate that, since it gives their AP team a real cost to work from instead of a ballpark of us vs. GitHub. My "we never pursue these" comment wasn't about us knowing the charge was shady - it was to clarify we have no strategy of chasing people/litigating over invoices they weren't aware of, which…

Do you plan to refund all previous free trial customers, who didn't contact the support, and actually paid unexpected overage fees?

Invoices are legally binding documents in many countries, and even if that might not be the case in your country, not everyone might be aware of that fact.

> since it gives their AP team a real cost to work from instead of a ballpark of us vs. GitHub

Same could be achieved by showing the real cost in the web app and/or sending a report via email, without scaring them away, and possibly _extorting_ them.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#202

Post by watermelon0 »

inigyou wrote: post #200
watermelon0 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to use a provider, that resorts to shady practices, especially since there are a lot of alternatives out there?

Who cares how bad the free trial experience is if the paying customer experience is good?

Technically, here the paying customer experience was the problem, not the free trial one, because they were automatically upgraded.

Generally, you don't want to award people/companies that don't respect you. I'm not saying that you shouldn't re-evaluate them in the future, but they will walk away with the wrong lesson if you just start throwing money at them.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#203

Post by zephen »

gblargg wrote: post #195
zephen wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two possibilities here: 1) They intended a bait-and-switch, where they were going to go after everybody for non-payment. According to the article, they might not even have a leg to stand on here. 2) If you take the quote from the company at face value, they realized that their free quota would be insufficient for conversion for some customers, and decided not to shut off services in the middle of evaluation…

> In this instance, the bill is a communication in advance -- if you provide a credit card in order to keep using our services, we want to get paid for everything you used after the free limit. That would be much more acceptable. If it worked out and you want to continue, you won't have a problem paying for the overage. If you decide it's not for you, then you can walk away and owe nothing. If it were communicated th…

I mean, the dude didn't even try to say he wasn't warned:

> We're writing to inform you that you've used up 80% of your free minutes for the forestwalklabs org this month. Please add a credit card on file to avoid disruptions to your service.

Then while they kept using it, if you read between the lines, they kept receiving more warnings.

> A couple weeks later we got a “You’ve spent $500.60 on Blacksmith this month” message, which didn’t seem true since we were on the free trial still. Maybe that was what it would have cost if we weren’t on the trial? Anyhow, it was one of an embarrassingly large number of usage-warning emails in our inboxes, and this one neither had a credit card nor impacted production users.

And he freely admits:

> 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 got value for it. So it’s not inherently dishonest, just surprising. My read is that they can do this.

Again, the only question is whether the company would have tried to collect if the customer stopped using it cold turkey. We have no way of knowing whether that would have happened or not.

And, really, at this point, in one way I think it doesn't matter. After having been on the front page of hacker news, the company will almost certainly work to make things clearer.

And in another way, it matters very deeply. A knee-jerk reaction to this would be to simply stop providing services after the free trial, and to point to this blog post and thread about how obviously continuing services was the wrong thing to do. They may be forced to do this if too many bad actors try to take advantage of them with multiple sign-ups.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#204

Post by Hikikomori »

inigyou wrote: post #127
Hikikomori wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be ok if you're buying a personal service?

Most countries have consumer protection laws, but they're only for consumers, due to the usual power imbalance. Power is expected to be balanced in B2B transactions - your lawyers spent as much time ensuring you weren't scammed as theirs spent trying to scam you - so there's no protection law about that. You get whatever the contract says you get.

Kinda sounds like the post I replied to was ok with companies scamming or using dark patterns on consumers. Even if they're better protected it's not like it's perfect.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#205

Post by gblargg »

zephen wrote: post #203
gblargg wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this instance, the bill is a communication in advance -- if you provide a credit card in order to keep using our services, we want to get paid for everything you used after the free limit. That would be much more acceptable. If it worked out and you want to continue, you won't have a problem paying for the overage. If you decide it's not for you, then you can walk away and owe nothing. If it were communicated th…

I mean, the dude didn't even try to say he wasn't warned: > We're writing to inform you that you've used up 80% of your free minutes for the forestwalklabs org this month. Please add a credit card on file to avoid disruptions to your service. Then while they kept using it, if you read between the lines, they kept receiving more warnings. > A couple weeks later we got a “You’ve spent $500.60 on Blacksmith this month”…

> I mean, the dude didn't even try to say he wasn't warned:

A warning that service will be disrupted if you don't add a credit card clearly implies that service would be cut off once they used up the free time. Continuing to get service is not a disruption. Maybe you were agreeing, not sure.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#206

Post by _pdp_ »

esafak wrote: post #196
_pdp_ wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://fireactions.io/ ?

We looked into it but it id not quite fit what we wanted. Other than that I think it is great software.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#207

Post by protocolture »

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...

No it wasn't. But my previous connection was dial up, and there were no costs provided for the data at all in the documentation I received.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#208

Post by inigyou »

watermelon0 wrote: post #202
inigyou wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares how bad the free trial experience is if the paying customer experience is good?

Technically, here the paying customer experience was the problem, not the free trial one, because they were automatically upgraded. Generally, you don't want to award people/companies that don't respect you. I'm not saying that you shouldn't re-evaluate them in the future, but they will walk away with the wrong lesson if you just start throwing money at them.

The problem here was with the free trial.

If you view it through a paying customer lens instead, then all you see is a paying customer who chose not to pay their invoice and might get sued. There's nothing strange about that.

All of the problem here was with the transition from free trial to paying customer.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#209

Post by fragmede »

SoftTalker wrote: post #153
ipsento606 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Of course, the funny part about that is that they charge you to check your balance at the ATM. It's almost as if they don't want you to and have to pay their fee.

Which of course is about as odorous fee as possible. You don't have enough money, so we're going to charge you more money?

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#210

Post by zephen »

gblargg wrote: post #205
zephen wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the dude didn't even try to say he wasn't warned: > We're writing to inform you that you've used up 80% of your free minutes for the forestwalklabs org this month. Please add a credit card on file to avoid disruptions to your service. Then while they kept using it, if you read between the lines, they kept receiving more warnings. > A couple weeks later we got a “You’ve spent $500.60 on Blacksmith this month”…

> I mean, the dude didn't even try to say he wasn't warned: A warning that service will be disrupted if you don't add a credit card clearly implies that service would be cut off once they used up the free time. Continuing to get service is not a disruption. Maybe you were agreeing, not sure.

The question is, is not immediately disrupting service a courtesy, or a dark pattern?

I think it boils down to intent, and now we can't have proof of intent since the OP paid up, but the wording of the messages he received could certainly be interpreted to be that the company thought they were doing him a courtesy.

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