Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 234 posts

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#31

Post by somewhatgoated »

mistermuckle wrote: post #27
mistermuckle wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You now owe me $500.

The $500 is now overdue.

By reading this comment, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#32

Post by greyb »

dheera wrote: post #21
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.

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.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#33

Post by lmm »

Holy shit, all that and then they paid? Worse, decided to use this product on an ongoing basis? I'm not sure who I hate more, Blacksmith for doing this or OP for being such a doormat about it.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#34

Post by dheera »

greyb wrote: post #32
dheera wrote: 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 way easier to just not give them a way they can charge you. That way you don't have to deal with a support representative fakely asking you how your weekend was, and who doesn't actually care about your weekend.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#37

Post by Natsu »

greyb wrote: post #32
dheera wrote: 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.

Funny, I got a fraud call recently because CrunchyRoll decided to try to renew a subscription I abandoned years ago and the card they have is expired.

I know it wasn't me because I gave up entirely on the service after they changed something about their login systems to reject my password and I could no longer get in. Support wanted me to jump through a lot of hoops and I just refused, choosing instead to just stop doing business there because I wasn't really watching anything at that point anyway.

This was around 2022, mind you, so they tried to renew me after several years with no explanation.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#38

Post by nikanj »

"I ignored a ton of emails from Blacksmith and then I was completely surprised by something that happened"

Lessons learned:

1) When you spam your users with too many emails (engagement! marketing-thinly-wrapped-as-transactional-information!), they stop reading your emails

2) Read your damn emails

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#39

Post by nerdile »

nikanj wrote: post #38

"I ignored a ton of emails from Blacksmith and then I was completely surprised by something that happened" Lessons learned: 1) When you spam your users with too many emails (engagement! marketing-thinly-wrapped-as-transactional-information!), they stop reading your emails 2) Read your damn emails

B2B is just businesses fighting over the value chain.

Blacksmith can send as many invoices as they want.

If the other business doesn't think it's worth the cost after the free trial, they don't have to pay the invoices.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#40

Post by rubyn00bie »

While I think it’s outrageous to send invoices to folks who aren’t paying customers… I’m a little surprised the service even has a niche (I’m old). I guess, with ubiquity of containers in our modern workflows, it seems strange to pay a service for what I assume is a dedicated, or well provisioned VPS, just to run CI. Hell you can probably get Jenkins (further showing my age here) running in less than an hour with Claude, GPT, or Deepseek on an obscure provider that offers cheap bare metal instances.

And for anyone who hasn’t used bare metal instead of over provisioned VPS for services the performance gap is noteworthy and substantial. Yeah, there is some risk because you have to worry about outages, upgrades, and configuration but for something like CI where there’s near zero data loss risk… it seems well worth it if performance of your CI/CD infrastructure is really an issue.

Post reply on HN