31–40 of 126 posts
This should be illegal. I can understand raising the rates on existing paid plans automatically, if nothing else it's eventually reasonable for inflation purposes, but auto-converting from free to paid? No.
Here's what I don't get: After a stunt like this, any reputation/brand value that you might have had is gone. So, the obvious conclusion is they bought the company purely to pull this trick. Any other value the company might have had is deleted. Can that have been worth it? Very few people will pay voluntarily, I can't imagine them successfully collecting the money, and the acquisition price probably wasn't 0 either. I can't imagine that the math checks out, or does it?
It seems such a shame. The blog (and presumably the product, although I never used it) was brimming with such optimism and confidence, "this is how you run a good business!" etc.
I bet Joel didn't envisage that product ending like this when he wrote all those articles. :(
Absolutely absurd. I haven't touched it for 13 years, and just received an email that they will be billing me $31.25 with 6 hours warning. This, of course, is a few hours after an email saying that my "free subscription" will be expiring in a month, not within hours. The kicker is that the billing FAQ 404s, the "account URL" 500s, and there is no apparent way to log in to the account that they are billing me for. At…
To play devils advocate, is this not just an exercise to remove stale accounts? It looks like everyone who received the email does not have a payment method on their account so it seems more like "If you don't add a payment method to your account we'll be closing it?" No?
Why not just write: Hey, we notice that your account isn't actively use, click here to close it.
Good luck to them trying to charge me for a free account that I used for 1 week more than 10 years ago, I'm fascinated to see how this 'revenue hacking' strategy works for them.
I used to enjoy reading the "Joel on Software" blog in e.g. 2004, and that was around the time he/they were working on this product. I guess it's been sold on, perhaps many times, since, and I guess if the new owners are trying this then they don't have many/any actual real paying customers. It seems such a shame. The blog (and presumably the product, although I never used it) was brimming with such optimism and conf…
I liked fogbugz back then but they clearly pivoted out of it and stopped really marketing it or even developing new features for it a long time ago.
Tried the same thing with Jumpcloud. Used it for a while. Disabled all users and moved on. 3 years (!!) later some debt collection lawyer contacts me about my $8000 bill. Wtf. Good luck collecting that.
If jumpcloud sold your account to a debt collector, they have already made their money. It's the debt collector who will lose out.