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Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

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Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#41

Post by nicbou »

zarzavat wrote: post #24

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…

This would not surprise me with a German service provider, although it got much better in the last decade.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#42

Post by hitekker »

zephen wrote: post #20

tl;dr: "Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it." It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards. You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger. And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it…

Billing statements disguised as marketing nudges is a cromulent business practice until the SaaS start sending bills to collections.

I think the author is being kind, both to themselves and startup practicing dark patterns. He walks through his own thinking, raises important questions and also gives the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t give.

IMHO, the article gets ahead of criticism well: accepting the valid critiques while also confining the weird/lazy ones to downvotes.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#44

Post by namenotrequired »

zephen wrote: post #20

tl;dr: "Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it." It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards. You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger. And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it…

It would be perfectly crumulent if it was explicitly communicated in advance.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#46

Post by Joel_Mckay »

dd8601fn wrote: post #3

That sounds sketchy AF.

Actually quite common, as the cost to fight them isn't worth the legal fees.

One must be extremely careful when signing off on something as a company representative.

One internal IP lawyer wanted a legal journal subscription, and left the tap running after they left the firm... that one cost $8k if I recall, as the journal sold the delinquent account to a collection agency. Took 3 weeks to verify it wasn't a scam, as the companies usually go quiet without the account number etc.

Some people are wired that way, and run their company on legal cons. Indeed, one doesn't want to have these people around your firm. =3

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#50

Post by 20thr »

MrAlex94 wrote: post #23

> 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…

Hugo from Namespace here. Thanks for the kind words! We try really hard to be there for teams, appreciate you recognizing that.
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