[deleted]
Surprise, pay $1000
81–90 of 234 posts
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data was counted as minutes back then for you? I only remember kB and MB costs...
Last century most people were only sometimes using the Internet. They'd "Go online", if you're young enough not to recognise that noise in Blue Prince when you use the network, that's a "Dial up modem" which is how a typical person would "Go online" in the mid-1990s. So in this regime counting minutes makes some sense. I got a preview of the modern world from about 1996 because my first shared student house (shout ou…
The similarity between mobile internet (CSD) and dial-up wasn't really obvious from the users' perspective because they weren't explicitly making a call to access the internet. The session was established transparently when data had to be transferred, and the time this took was charged as minutes.
Operators always dreamed of a world built on circuit-switched networks that they fully control instead of packet-switched IP networks where anyone can take part and operators are just a carrier. So the big operators started the mobile internet era with the telephony model.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#83I'm old enough to remember that capitalism used to always feel like this. Even worse. Predatory subscriptions, targeting minors in some cases (remember phone ringtones?), toll numbers, unclear fees, surprise bills (my favorite - roaming fees in your home country because the phone stayed logged into the foreign network after an abroad trip). Silicon Valley/YC style startups felt like a breath of fresh air. Generous return policies, subscriptions can be canceled monthly and even do so automatically in a lot of cases (eg disabled credit card). I guess the fact that a lot of what they offered has near zero marginal cost helped. AI changed that part, so we're back to what I would consider the natural state.
The least-resistance path out of such a bad equilibrium is regulation. And they did add a lot of protections in the last decades, which probably helped too. Some would say places like the EU even added too many. But I'm pretty sure that "if you're using our product, you need to pay" would fly even in the most customer-friendly jurisdictions today.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#84So ive done this before when I deal with predatory and 'free trial' companies.
Go get a $20 gas station credit card. They get THAT card, and whatever name you want to provide.
When they demand $x000 for their free trial, they get.... $20!
And before anyone bemoans their 50+ page onesided "contract" that weasel-words revokes 'free trial'... Sure, they can publish a claim and sell off a debt to "John Q Public". We can see how far they'll get with that.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#85Standard growth-hack douche-baggery.
You'd think the YC mentors would give advice like "Don't be a dick to your potential customers".
Also I'd tell them where to stick their invoice.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#86WoW. 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…
> I'd never expect an invoice after not putting in a card.
Startups have to innovate to stay alive and YC never discourages this kind of "innovation" if the startup has the potential to turn into big dollars.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#87Years ago I got my first internet enabled mobile, and the carrier advertised it as having "300 free minutes" as part of the trial period, which is great. So I used 297 minutes of internet services in the first month, but aha actually the minutes only referred to telephony, and I was stung with a ~12,000 dollar overdue mobile internet invoice (360 dollars per megabyte or something equally ludicrous) They got done in b…
This is why I'm pretty sympathetic to hard caps by default
For consumer products, definitely. Any unreasonably large charge (with a comfortable margin, like 10x) should be waived by default, unless the client specifically requested the limit be removed.
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#88Not just the weird billing, which has been annoying the last month I've been trying it, but they have had a couple incidents lately where I feel like I got ripped off because their performance was so spotty and yet I was getting billed for it. https://status.blacksmith.sh/
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#89[deleted]
Re: Surprise, pay $1000
#90WoW. 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…
> I'd never expect an invoice after not putting in a card. Startups have to innovate to stay alive and YC never discourages this kind of "innovation" if the startup has the potential to turn into big dollars.
Yep, the "Its not fraud/illegal if you make defense against cost more than just paying the cost".
It turns legitimate enterprises and businesses into quazi-illegal scam engines. Like, health clubs or Adobe scam-subscriptions.