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Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

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Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#91

Post by ErroneousBosh »

protocolture wrote: post #29

Years 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…

Many many years ago my girlfriend at the time was on holiday with her mother so I'd added a "Roaming Bundle" to her phone.

While she was away I got a call from our phone provider that she'd racked up £1700 of roaming charges. "But don't worry about it!" said the customer service person, "Just stop your direct debit for this month just in case and we will call you when the bill is generated."

A couple of weeks later, they rang back, confirmed that the final amount was about two grand, and so I said "hang on, there was supposed to be a message when the bundle was halfway used and a message when the bundle was nearly used up - what happened to that?"

"Oh I don't know why you'd have been told that, we've never done that! But you're right, that's what they said, we've already listened to the call. What you *should* have been offered was this *other* bundle which would have cost £150, she's used about 75% of the data that would provide, plus the £25 you originally paid for the first bundle, call it 75 quid then? I'll just take the card number..."

And that, gentle reader, is why I'm still a customer.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#92

Post by dkersten »

Why am I not surprised that its a YC startup? Lately, being a YC startup seems to have become a negative signal for me, far too many grifters are getting funded by YC, it seems.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#93

Post by ErroneousBosh »

tialaramex wrote: post #72
soco wrote: post #62

Earlier 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…

> 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

I have some lovely high-quality video of dialup modems both dialling out and dialling into with good audio, which I'll post up at some point.

We still use them at work, at least until BT finally cut the copper services off at the end of the year.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#94

Post by john_strinlai »

>Blacksmith helps us build faster, and once we agreed to pay for the (actually useful) service, their support got friendlier. So… we’ll probably switch back.

well, that was one of the most disappointing conclusions that i have read recently.

i am almost more frustrated with this decision than i am with the billing shenanigans. please do not reward this scummy behavior.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#95

Post by em-bee »

Terr_ wrote: post #59
ErigmolCt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm pretty sympathetic to hard caps by default

That makes me think of bank overdraft fees. They are another kind of "soft" cap, pitched as an automatic convenience to the customer... But in practice they are too-often deceptive and harmful. https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/are-banks-the-...

i always set my overdraft limit to zero. i never want to use that by accident.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#96

Post by mathgeek »

ffsm8 wrote: post #73
mathgeek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet access used to be billed by the minute back in the Prodigy/Compuserve/AOL days, and early phone plans mirrored that for ease of marketing.

Other way around. The phone plans were billed by the minute. Then came the Internet. In is first generation, Internet was essentially just a long distance call through a modem. Hence it was billed - like the call - by the minute. Dedicated Internet wires came much later, and then the dedicated phone lines were dropped as voip was better quality and cheaper compared to the dedicated lines. While the phone still had a…

I'm thoroughly confused as to how what you're saying differs from my previous post, but I believe you just misunderstand that by "early phone plans" in my post's and the parent post's context, I meant phone plans for Internet access ("early" being the feature phone era).

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#97

Post by numpad0 »

soco wrote: post #62
protocolture wrote: post #29

Years 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…

Data was counted as minutes back then for you? I only remember kB and MB costs...

It was one thing to use the line to call an ISP, which can be a company of its own, and another to use their Internet access on that call.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#98

Post by s3cur3 »

Having been a happy customer of Blacksmith, Depot, and Ubicloud at various points (all three of which offer GitHub Actions runners at cheaper prices than GitHub themselves), I agree the billing here is weird. It's worth pointing out, though, that you have to use a lot of CI minutes to incur a $1000 bill. You're well outside of hobbyist levels, and that same level of usage would have previously cost double from GitHub themselves. This a business with serious compute needs, being asked to pay real money.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#99

Post by gwbas1c »

soco wrote: post #62
protocolture wrote: post #29

Years 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…

Data was counted as minutes back then for you? I only remember kB and MB costs...

If you were used to dial-up internet, (IE, where your computer was plugged into a phone line and made a phone call to your internet service provider,) that's a reasonable assumption to make. Some early services billed by the minute, too.
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