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

Bit.ly's shady business model

ozkatz.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–58 of 58 posts

Re: Bit.ly's shady business model

#51

Post by 3pt14159 »

andrewvc wrote: post #21

This is absurd. I was the CTO at a startup with a small budget and looked into bit.ly. You know what I did? I looked at their damn TOS, because when you're running a business you look at ALL your third party service's TOS's. ESPECIALLY the free ones. It was quite nice of bit.ly to voluntarily cut your bill. Instead of learning something valuable about how the market works you've shifted the blame to someone else. You…

Nope.

Bitly is being pretty damn shady. Their home page says "sign up for free" and doesn't mention pricing anywhere, and their signup page doesn't mention paid options.

People don't have time to read every single terms of service. ToS are basically there to stop dicks from being dicks and then suing you, not to bury how you are going to hold someone's business hostage.

Re: Bit.ly's shady business model

#52

Post by missblit »

diwo wrote: post #49
ozkatz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as of april last year when we signed up for bit.ly that page was nowhere to be found

Let's see what Internet Archive says about this. In April 2013 the Bitly homepage looked like this: http://web.archive.org/web/20130401021533/https://bitly.com/ It had the new brand in use, and it had a "You Business?" link to Enterprise site: http://web.archive.org/web/20130404123817/http://www.enterpr... The enterprise site advices you to contact them for pricing.

For reference the ToS from March 2013 is here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130320100810/http://bitly.com/p...

It still contains the clause outlining that the free version is for non-commercial use only.

Re: Bit.ly's shady business model

#53

Post by frostmatthew »

The article has been updated to say "My biggest gripe with bit.ly is not their pricing, it's their policy of not letting users export their data and by that locking their users in." - so basically in addition to building his business around violating terms of service he couldn't be bothered to read he also never considered vendor lock-in.

When choosing any technology or service one shouldn't expect there to always be an easy way to switch. Vendor lock-in is something that needs to be considered and investigated before deciding a technology or service. With the author's updated "biggest gripe" it sounds like he would consider it Oracle's fault if he built his business using OracleDB and then decided to switch to MongoDB.

I never heard of Swayy before reading this article - but it did a lot more to convince me to never consider using it than convince me of anything "shady" on bit.ly's end.

Re: Bit.ly's shady business model

#54

Post by 0x0 »

On the other hand: What if bit.ly shut down operations / went bankrupt / lost all their data? Would that change anything for you?

This is like bit.ly shutting down. Except! If you pay a fee, they won't shut down after all.

But I do agree that hiding pricing in small print is uncool.

Re: Bit.ly's shady business model

#55

Post by frostmatthew »

3pt14159 wrote: post #51
andrewvc wrote: post #21

This is absurd. I was the CTO at a startup with a small budget and looked into bit.ly. You know what I did? I looked at their damn TOS, because when you're running a business you look at ALL your third party service's TOS's. ESPECIALLY the free ones. It was quite nice of bit.ly to voluntarily cut your bill. Instead of learning something valuable about how the market works you've shifted the blame to someone else. You…

Nope. Bitly is being pretty damn shady. Their home page says "sign up for free" and doesn't mention pricing anywhere, and their signup page doesn't mention paid options. People don't have time to read every single terms of service. ToS are basically there to stop dicks from being dicks and then suing you, not to bury how you are going to hold someone's business hostage.

The "sign up for free" link on the home page is for individual users, not for companies/brands. If you click the "Learn More" button in the "Bitly Brand Tools" section (which is far more prominent than the sign up link) the following pages do have a "Pricing" link in the top navigation bar (and that's presumably the signup they would need to use to make use of the "brand tools" features).

And yes most people do not read "every single terms of service" - but a business would be foolish to have so much of their business rely on another without reading the other's ToS. A look at Swayy's home page says "By connecting, you are agreeing to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy." - funny they expect their users to agree to their ToS but can't be bothered to read ones for services they use.

As for bit.ly holding them "hostage" that's something Swayy should have considered before choosing them (or anyone else). What was Swayy's plan if bit.ly went out of business?

Re: Bit.ly's shady business model

#56

Post by theboss »

I'm curious. To people who have purchased bitly, why? I feel like setting it up would take as long as writing your own. My very first web project I ever did was to write a url shortener and it took me less than an afternoon. A good engineer I'm sure could do it in less than an hour.

For the price, what does it get you?

Re: Bit.ly's shady business model

#57

Post by yebyen »

jplur wrote: post #50
jasode wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they realistically "allow" you to export your data? Would it require extra programmer effort and cost to develop such export functionality? If they didn't invest the money to build that capability, why would they want to? What's the ROI for them to do it? It took several years for GMail to have mailbox export capabilities. Some team somewhere has to write and test all that code.

Is there even data to export? It appears to me the OP would need the bit.ly domain to preserve the links, otherwise he could just scrape all the URLs and find a way to redirect them.

He used his own custom URL, which is cleverer because he can take it with him, but not so clever because ... reason we are having this conversation now, you have to think this through! I've never used Bit.ly's hosted service, but he already said there's no way to export the data. So, hopefully clear there is some data, Bit.ly has a list of shared URLs from his customers, and they've populated a database with some short codes in order to redirect them.

They are (correct me if I'm not understanding how this service works) the only ones in a position to know which short URLs are already used and which ones are not.

So, if the list of short codes is short enough that he can search it in a couple of days and follow all of the links, then that's obviously what he should be doing rather than having public gripe time on HN.

(Then again, if he pays them just once he gets a decent bit of extra time, and they get paid for providing the service when his business was too small to justify him bringing his own infrastructure. Win-win?)

Re: Bit.ly's shady business model

#58

Post by xtracto »

ozkatz wrote: post #8
mcmillion wrote: post #5

If your product is taking off, learn from your mistake of not following the ToS and just build your own in-house URL shortener.

Very true. Not shying away from my responsibility. I'm mostly to blame. And still - can't say I like bit.ly's way of doing business.

You should really put the article up again... it is disgusting when people won't stand for their actions and try to hide what they did. I would very much prefer you give an apology at the top of your text, rather than trying to sneak away by removing your original writing.

Fortunately, Archive.org has the original:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140612150420/http://ozkatz.git...

Post reply on HN