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Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

221–230 of 234 posts

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#221

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.…

> You went to Austria and did Austrian business with an Austrian company, you should be aware that Austrian rules and norms apply. The consumer purchases a domain name from their registrar. Neither the consumer nor their registrar are in Austria. The registrar is the one providing the service of registering the domain with the NIC. The NIC can't just say "we have a contract directly with the consumer". The registrar…

When I buy something from an Austrian company through my ISP, Austrian rules still apply and my ISP doesn't have any duty to stop me or warn me.

I agree domain registrars should display a warning. They often display other warnings, like that certain TLDs require verified addresses or that they don't allow WHOIS privacy.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#222
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That may be how things work in some countries, but not in the US, even under Trump. Let’s Encrypt evidently didn’t mean to block all of Iran, only the Iranian government, which I assume is capable of getting its own certificates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465754

Let's Encrypt evidently meant what they said, and the evidence is the fact that they said it. And they said they were sanctioning the whole country of Iran.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Self-hosted runners make a ton of API calls during job execution, so they might not be completely wrong here.

That's for console output and status.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#224
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 So those people who would feel guilty not paying are punished and those who prefer to try to cheat the system by skipping payment on invoices are systematically rewarded?

That's how business works!

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read it as it's okay to complain if it happens with a personal service but for B2B your complaint is invalid.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#226
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be how things work in some countries, but not in the US, even under Trump. Let’s Encrypt evidently didn’t mean to block all of Iran, only the Iranian government, which I assume is capable of getting its own certificates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465754

Let's Encrypt evidently meant what they said, and the evidence is the fact that they said it. And they said they were sanctioning the whole country of Iran.

(The comment I linked is by the executive director of the organization that runs Let’s Encrypt, and he seems to disagree.)

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#227
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…

Founder of Depot [0] here. Feel free to try us out. We have a real free trial that is time based that doesn’t do odd things like this. Also have usage limits that you can put in place to further clamp down on runaway surprises. [0] https://depot.dev

Site looks great!

I did notice that on the `products/github-actions` page, the metrics for the zed-industries/zed repo are missing. It's showing a `NaNm NaNs` for both the With and Without Depot sections. Might be worth fixing it, as the current state reads as Depot providing no improvement for zed.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A letter from an attorney to B&N’s legal department might be required to get their attention. They are effectively committing wire fraud, so maybe talk to your local DA?

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#229
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…

Perhaps I'm playing advocate of the devil here:

But does the fact that you have preconceived expectations about 'try for free' necessarily mean that a business offering 'try for free' has to meet all those expectations?

Technically 'try for free' can mean anything, and I'm pretty sure that they have declared it somewhere (perhaps in the terms & conditions that people just agree to). Isn't it up to the business to do their due dilligence about the services they get from vendors?

Personally I think they've exploited the expectations everybody have about 'try for free', and they're morally wrong for that. But I'm pretty sure that morals never come into play when it comes to (US) business, so I wonder if we can really fault a company for doing whatever is legally allowed?

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#230
post #32
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They will usually refund you if you end up getting charged because you forgot to cancel. It isn't worth the headache of a chargeback. Plus they have to pay a fee for chargebacks regardless of whether they think it's valid or not, so strong disincentive.

it's also not easy to just apply for a chargeback in some jurisdiction. they are betting you will just give up and chalk it up as an expensive lesson.
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