Surprise, pay $1000(forestwalk.ai) |
Surprise, pay $1000(forestwalk.ai) |
But it's interesting that the only real difference is that they let you proceed without putting your credit card info in.
In Europe it's perfectly normal to be bound by terms of a paid service. I would never expect to avoid being liable for payments for services rendered only because I didn’t enter a cc number before exceeding free-tier limits.
Even in the comments below people are stating that this bill is valid only if they want to continue using the service.
I mean, it's a sleazy practice, especially considering how they word their emails, but I wouldn't expect something for nothing just because I hadn't set up a billing mechanism yet.
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.
...boilerplate...
...more boilerplate...
Terms... and conditions...
...limitations...
...liabilities...
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.
"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 valuable.
You have two choices. Pay up to keep using it, or stop.
The fact that you decided to pay up to keep using it is actually, imo, a pretty good advertisement for the service.
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.
Nothing to excuse
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.
Well, I should have probably said that instead of sued. But the intent is the same.
> I think the author is being kind, both to themselves and startup practicing dark patterns.
It's unclear it's a dark pattern. The author explicitly states that this particular EULA doesn't allow them to bill without a credit card.
But it's also unclear that this practice will survive the exposure on hacker news.
No, not because it's a "dark pattern" but because it enables customer dark patterns. Run up a bill and then go use something else.
1) They intended a bait-and-switch, where they were going to go after everybody for non-payment. According to the article, they might not even have a leg to stand on here.
2) If you take the quote from the company at face value, they realized that their free quota would be insufficient for conversion for some customers, and decided not to shut off services in the middle of evaluation. In this instance, the bill is a communication in advance -- if you provide a credit card in order to keep using our services, we want to get paid for everything you used after the free limit.
Now, you can argue (and many are) about whether this is a good business practice or not, but it really doesn't matter. After making the front page of hacker news, it's probably not one they're going to continue, simply because now that everybody knows about it, you'll probably have a lot of bad actors doing multiple signups, just to siphon off as much token usage as possible.
My own answer is that there is nothing (incromulent? uncromulent? well, anyway, not cromulent) about suing people who knowingly and deliberately racked up debts with you, but that common business practices, including the overwhelming abundance of free services everywhere in every product category, and the ability to immediately shut off internet services when you aren't paid, lead to sort of a gestalt of expectations about how things are done.
The article itself says that the terms of service only allow billing if a payment method have been provided, so suing absent that provision would probably be a non-starter anyway.
On the bright? side, suing would definitely keep them on the front page of hacker news longer.
That would be much more acceptable. If it worked out and you want to continue, you won't have a problem paying for the overage. If you decide it's not for you, then you can walk away and owe nothing. If it were communicated that way it would be a different situation.
> We're writing to inform you that you've used up 80% of your free minutes for the forestwalklabs org this month. Please add a credit card on file to avoid disruptions to your service.
Then while they kept using it, if you read between the lines, they kept receiving more warnings.
> A couple weeks later we got a “You’ve spent $500.60 on Blacksmith this month” message, which didn’t seem true since we were on the free trial still. Maybe that was what it would have cost if we weren’t on the trial? Anyhow, it was one of an embarrassingly large number of usage-warning emails in our inboxes, and this one neither had a credit card nor impacted production users.
And he freely admits:
> And let’s be clear: our agents run a lot of CI jobs, so we did expect to hit the limits of the free plan. We used the service and got value for it. So it’s not inherently dishonest, just surprising. My read is that they can do this.
Again, the only question is whether the company would have tried to collect if the customer stopped using it cold turkey. We have no way of knowing whether that would have happened or not.
And, really, at this point, in one way I think it doesn't matter. After having been on the front page of hacker news, the company will almost certainly work to make things clearer.
And in another way, it matters very deeply. A knee-jerk reaction to this would be to simply stop providing services after the free trial, and to point to this blog post and thread about how obviously continuing services was the wrong thing to do. They may be forced to do this if too many bad actors try to take advantage of them with multiple sign-ups.
A warning that service will be disrupted if you don't add a credit card clearly implies that service would be cut off once they used up the free time. Continuing to get service is not a disruption. Maybe you were agreeing, not sure.
Maybe? Or maybe expectations catch up with reality? I mean, does anybody really go into a car dealership thinking the dealer isn't going to do their best to rip them off? Or believe that "their" real estate agent is "on their side?"
I think most people just accept that the world is full of rip-off artists.
Which is kind of sad, really. If one person pushes back on bad billing, the company still makes money, even if it has to do a refund.
But if everybody were to always push back? It wouldn't be worth it to try to tack on extra fees for non-rendered services.
That's why all these groups of people are able to make so much money. If everyone expected a car dealer to rip them off, car dealers wouldn't be able to rip anyone off and there wouldn't be so many of them.
Can't believe they continued using the service after this. I would refuse to pay (they have no legal basis to require payment, and their own terms of service seems to disagree with their behavior) and find a more ethical provider.
It's not illegal or even unethical to bill someone who hasn't given their CC, but it's definitely unexpected.
Either say one month free and end after that, or end after the free data amount. If the customer finds value they will sign up and be less likely to look at their credit card bills.
This just pisses people off and puts the cost front and centre so they can't ignore it.
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
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.
It was disappointing to see -- I've used Depot in the past and will stick with them where possible.
The argument of "like many early startup do, we oversaw this and ignored that" doesn't really make it better.
In German-speaking (DACH) countries the companies aren't lazy and they will take you to court and the court will make you pay all legal and court fees as well as the debt. It's a near certainty they will bother. In the USA you're hoping they won't bother and they'll be satisfied with just banning you as a customer. I think this is because each party pays their own legal fees in the USA.
I think it boils down to intent, and now we can't have proof of intent since the OP paid up, but the wording of the messages he received could certainly be interpreted to be that the company thought they were doing him a courtesy.
They got done in by a massive class action, that I was tangentially a beneficiary of, not because of the minutes claim, which was standard practice, but because they had failed to provide anyone with the cost of the data.
I think I paid them 300 bucks or something in the end. After further letting a 600 dollar agreement go to collections and settling with collections for 50%.
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.
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 got a preview of the modern world from about 1996 because my first shared student house (shout out to any Hitchers reading) had a single dial-up modem set to always connect to a free-to-use University modem and then used IP Masquerading (the ancestor of today's NATs) so that all of our computers could share this tiny connection.
So by the time of my 21st birthday, I was "always on" in the same sense that you'd always be today, except with much, much lower bandwidth and what I can tell you is that this, not the bandwidth is what makes the difference.
When you're "always on" the reflexive answer to "Wait, where do Porcupines live?" is to look online. It's 1996 so Wikipedia doesn't exist yet. Google doesn't exist yet. But Tim's crap hypermedia system (the "World Wide Web") exists and so you just need to know where to look to find information about porcupines.
I didn't watch videos in 1996 because it'd take hours to receive a short low resolution video, even reading web comics was quite an undertaking, I remember downloading all of Bruno (at the time) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_(webcomic) over night so I could read it. But the fact you don't have to explicitly "go online" makes a huge qualitative difference even though the bandwidth is tiny.
By the time phones got built-in WAP browsers, GPRS had arrived which was billed per byte, but CSD was still supported (I remember using it once or twice in a certain building at uni where GPRS never worked for some reason)
[cue misty eyed memories of trying to get my Psion 5mx to connect to the Internet by infra-red serial link to my phone, to try get updated connection information for my next train as the one I was on was going to be too late to make the planned connection…]
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 than most other trials.
With most of these, they end, the service stops working, and you have a choice to make: (a) it was worth it sign up, (b) not worth it revert.
There's no rule that domain names expire unless you renew them, at least for ccTLDs. It's just a convention. Conventions lead to assumptions, and assumptions can be used to scam people.
In general there's two types of businesses: businesses where you pre-pay (e.g. McDonalds), and businesses where you post-pay (e.g. a sit-down restaurant). If you take a conventionally pre-pay service and apply post-pay pricing to it, you have yourself a perfect scam.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1bnjus/the_austri...
https://www.nic.at/en/how-at-works/domain-holder#id105
> I received a letter from the debt collection agency. What can I do?
> If a domain hasn't been paid for despite several payment reminders from nic.at, the domain shall be locked and the open claim handed over to our debt collection agency. As a result, the invoice must be paid directly to the debt collection agency. Please contact our debt collection agency for more information
Like TFA it's hard to tell if they genuinely believe that they are helping their customers by not discontinuing their service, or if it's a scam. I suspect a mixture of both.
> By providing payment information, You authorize us to charge Your credit card for usage fees or, in the case of invoice-based contracts, agree to make timely payments as specified in the invoicing terms.
Unless this guy had a larger contract and requested to be billed via invoice, this is a violation of terms and he should tell them to stuff it.
Plus they have to pay a fee for chargebacks regardless of whether they think it's valid or not, so strong disincentive.
Startups are usually resource-rich and time-poor, and don't want to allocate employee time to infrastructure unless it's core to their business, so arguments for efficient spending there are easily overlooked.
Unless you can optimise your CI runtime to be very balanced and fast, you're going to have a lot of jobs queued during working hours ... although it costs more per minute, the fact that CI jobs are bursty means it works out not too much costlier but with less queue time.
1. I'm not sure if blacksmith offers larger runners, but you if you're using them you have checked that bigger runners are worth the squeeze? A 2x runner does not mean a 2x faster build - I had a goal and sized CI according to that.
2. Caching. Nx can do this for your TS, provided your code is decomposed into packages.
3. At a previous job I had a post-run timings job. GH markdown supports Mermaid; I used a gannt chart to express it. I don't remember if the GH api supports getting timing for the current wf - so it may have been a second workflow.
The first is just a little legwork, the rest your agent should be able to do in 5 minutes.
Also, can the author tell us how much this would have cost on GH actions?
Interesting question, and I think it makes sense they’ve chosen to be pragmatic.
However, I wonder if Blacksmith get bitten in the arse by this. Hopefully that changes their behaviour but, like many startups, they might simply fail.
So I suppose the trick becomes to keep using the service without getting locked into it until it becomes clearer whether they will succeed or not, then perhaps you can consider taking advantage of platform features.
Even then, I don’t know how much I trust Blacksmith or would want to make it hard for myself to move away from them.
And on GitHub actions: Microsoft are very good at owning the platform and then making products and features that are just useful enough that it’s not worth switching to a better alternative but absolutely no more. GitHub Actions is an obvious example, Teams is another, but the list is long. To me it reads as a more modern variant of the anticompetitive behaviour of the 1990s. It sets up enough of a barrier to keep others out, and kills innovation. I’m not a fan.
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.
> While amusingly as of June 8 Blacksmith’s terms implied that their right to bill you is contingent on you providing payment information, a SaaS app certainly could have terms that obligate users to pay for unexpected overage when on a free trial.
> And let’s be clear: our agents run a lot of CI jobs, so we did expect to hit the limits of the free plan. We used the service and got value for it. So it’s not inherently dishonest, just surprising. My read is that they can do this.
So I read this that the terms say "blacksmith will only bill you if you provide payment information" but then they say that blacksmith can bill you if you don't provide payment information. That seems to contradict the terms, which I would assume underlie the "contract" that you agree to when agreeing to the terms.
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
However, I can share what we did to ease on our GitHub Actions bills if it helps.
Effectively we have our own runners hooked so that a job is scheduled, a runner picks it up and goes with it. We still use GitHub Actions but our monthly bill is now flat because we pay for a server. It is about 6x cheaper if not more.
The solution is not open source but it boils down to a Go service that orchestrates firecracker vms. All the vms are pre-warmed so there is always a fresh supply of workers to pick jobs of various sizes.
It is basic and it works. We have not had any issues since deployed.
The runners can be anything from 1 cpu 2 GB to 64GB 8 cpus. We can add more worker types in a config file.
I am not exaggerating when I say that we used to pay 1000s per month for this. Now our bills are in the range of a few hundred. Other dev boxes are done in the same way.
Caveat here being that GitHub is exploring charging a usage-based fee for self-hosted GitHub Action runners [1]. While they've halted it for now, it's something worth being aware of as you assess your costs. This is probably a drop in the bucket compared to the order of magnitude savings you've described.
[1]: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler...
I want to say upfront - we've never pursued these invoices. If someone feels they didn't get value from the service, we've eaten that cost and always will.
There's a bit of an implicit policy decision on our side here that we did a bad job of communicating - I want to clarify that, and then talk about how we can fix it.
First, we wanted to let customers start using Blacksmith without a credit card. Very few infra startups do this today - CC validation is great for anti-abuse - but doing so has let us support a much greater number of free users.
Many of these free users have turned into full OSS sponsorships (most recently ccusage, and before that, OpenClaw) or large paying accounts, and we haven't wanted to cut those users off from trying us. It's a real pain point to find a credit card to put down for your company or OSS project's CI spend before you've even tried the service.
Second, not having a credit card on file means we don't actually know when credit card-less users intend to continue past their free trial.
Shutting down users CI workloads entirely seemed harsh, especially because doing so would fail builds and require a code change to resolve. If users could start without a credit card, we weren't going to then hold their runners hostage. Instead, we decided to just eat the cost for the small number of users who either abused our services or did not actually mean to use the service.
This worked, mostly - though every month we have gotten a number of support cases with users confused about their invoice. If they didn't intend to use the service past the free tier, we've voided out the invoice, and often given credits against a future bill if they intended to use the service, but were surprised by the behavior.
We have a lot to improve about our billing mechanics - but because our retention rate for these users has been so high, we have assumed great support could catch and resolve the ambiguity.
That said, there's two changes we can make now:
1. we clearly missed the mark on supporting this specific case - we should have offered to void this bill entirely given the surprise factor here.
2. We're prioritizing up making progress on a Wallet implementation that will let folks choose to suspend their runners rather than let them continue to run after they use up their free tier.
We also just launched a new billing/metrics view so users have better visibility into their free tier and Blacksmith usage.
I'm sorry for the bad taste this has left in everyone's mouth - I'll be hanging out here and on greg [at] blacksmith [dot] sh if you want to talk about your account specifically.
It's Talos Linux on Hetzner VMs where all resources are managed via kubenix, and all CI runners are running NixOS.
So... extremely affordable and extremely performant, but very complicated.
Drop me an email if you want the writeup when I get around to making it.
Until then, here's a Forgejo Actions that compiles its own CI runner image:
https://git.shine.town/infra/runners/src/branch/main/.forgej...
No Docker involved in the build process, it's all Nix.
Unfortunately the CI runner itself is still Docker-in-Docker because:
https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/66#issuecomm...
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.
And let me know how a lawsuit against "John Q Public" will go, along with an email from fakemail.net and a gas station preloaded credit card.
Companies deserve this sort of treatment if they say shit like "FREE TRIAL" and silently convert you to 'you owe money' with no hard limits. And naturally, paragraph 37, sentence 12 includes this disclaimer. That should be blatantly clear, but its not cause they are scammers.
So, fuck'em.
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 them.
And they are from Helsinki so big plus for anyone from Nordics.
Where's the "grown explosively" bit coming from? Google doesn't have growth news from 2026, only early 2025.
I did notice that on the `products/github-actions` page, the metrics for the zed-industries/zed repo are missing. It's showing a `NaNm NaNs` for both the With and Without Depot sections. Might be worth fixing it, as the current state reads as Depot providing no improvement for zed.
A very simple example of a scam that's probably happened to you if you own a domain name: as the expiration date approaches you'll get "invoices" from companies for domain name renewal charges. If you read the fine print it will say "this is a solicition for business" but otherwise it looks just like an invoice. Some people will just pay them.
That went on for a couple years. Then one day she left town basically in the middle of the night and we never heard from her again.
After all B2B transactions are often invoice based.
But does the fact that you have preconceived expectations about 'try for free' necessarily mean that a business offering 'try for free' has to meet all those expectations?
Technically 'try for free' can mean anything, and I'm pretty sure that they have declared it somewhere (perhaps in the terms & conditions that people just agree to). Isn't it up to the business to do their due dilligence about the services they get from vendors?
Personally I think they've exploited the expectations everybody have about 'try for free', and they're morally wrong for that. But I'm pretty sure that morals never come into play when it comes to (US) business, so I wonder if we can really fault a company for doing whatever is legally allowed?
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.
It turns legitimate enterprises and businesses into quazi-illegal scam engines. Like, health clubs or Adobe scam-subscriptions.
But honestly, this feels like damage control. This is (to me) clearly an innovation on a dark pattern that is basically just "accepted practice" nowadays, namely the "subscribe by default; make it hard to opt-out of said subscription at signup time".
That's why I think people are upset about this. By not taking a credit card, you made it feel like it wasn't an implementation of that dark pattern (yay!) -- however, secretly, it was!
If the intent is to be customer friendly, it's so perfectly clear to me what the answer is. OPT-IN. In other words, a checkbox:
"By default, when your free credits are consumed, all of your runners will be de-provisioned. Instead, if you would prefer that your runners continue working, check this box and we will invoice you for usage in excess of your free credits."
But honestly, you did more than I expect of most service providers today. You sent an email; you actually told them how many credits were left in the free tier. AWS, for example, can only give me an _estimate_ of how much cost I've accrued. They can make no promises about the rate at which I'm expected to accrue new costs. And, unless I've taken great care (by, say, terraforming every resource in a given AWS account), "turning off my cost accruing services" is not a simple matter. If I understood the article correctly, there was, at least, a "single action" they could have taken to immediately stop accruing costs.
Yeah, I hear you on the inversion of expectations and I think you're exactly right about how this affects perceptions of the product.
Candidly, right now, we're more likely to land on an opt-out rather than opt-in here since getting your builds to actually run again requires a code change. I think there's a full blog post to write about why we think this is the right default, but we're still thinking it through.
Regardless, we need to make the choice loud and visible, and our miss was making it too hidden. We'll close that gap.
At first glance that sounds admirable, but the flipside is that it implies Blacksmith knows they're being shady: if you know you're not going to pursue it, why did you invoice the customer in the first place? This sounds less like you're forgiving a charity case and more like you're waiving an invoice because the customer identified it as unethical to begin with.
I partially disagree! We issue an invoice because the customer did consume the services - a lot of folks appreciate that, since it gives their AP team a real cost to work from instead of a ballpark of us vs. GitHub.
My "we never pursue these" comment wasn't about us knowing the charge was shady - it was to clarify we have no strategy of chasing people/litigating over invoices they weren't aware of, which came up a bunch in the thread.
I do agree that pushing surprised customers through a support ticket is wrong, and that our in-product language compounded that issue. Controlling this belongs in the product so we can hit the mark on trust - we're building that now.
This isn't shady for most folks, since they're typically comparing us to known, expensive alternative. For those who are surprised by their spend (which given GHA's upper-bound pricing has been a minority) our reconciliation flow was for them to contact support, and my comment was to clarify that we don't have an intentional strategy to pursue folks for invoices they weren't aware of. It's clear to me that controlling this behavior belongs in the product so we can hit the mark on trust - we're working on adding that now.
So those people who would feel guilty not paying are punished and those who prefer to try to cheat the system by skipping payment on invoices are systematically rewarded?
First off, fair point on the free tier email. This fits in the same theme of clarity vs. trust for me: if we say disruption, but then leave your account enabled, that still feels deceptive even if it seems generous to us. We will fix.
On your last point - I just want to note that this isn't a money-maker for us. Runner bills can be large (as they were here!), and we explicitly wanted to avoid actual charges to the user in favor of not collecting for a good amount of usage. Again, there's a clarity/trust tension there that you're right to call out, but the end goal is that more people can use cheaper, faster runners.
We earn that trust today by being extremely easy to use and delivering on what we promise, and we need to add clarity to that list. Thanks for the feedback.
Reminds me of the company Tado, who was testing to see if people would pay by making them think they would have to even though they didn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfAchfFXghc
Looking back at support cases we have typically seen this at much lower spend too, so it's definitely a clarity issue that we will fix.
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.
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.
Interestingly, TDM carriers have a latency of approximately one bit per hop and jitter less than that, while any kind of packetized voice such as VoIP has a latency of at least one packet worth of audio, plus one to several packet transmission times per hop, and jitter of several packet transmission times, and packet drop on top of all that. We've actually made quality worse in the name of fitting more services down the same wire, which isn't necessarily bad but it's something to think about.
At uni it was fast. So you could actually load images by default.
Sounds like you need to share infra with an org of similar needs in a vastly different timezone.
I guess that's what SaaS CI solutions are in a way. :)
Ok how do you expect me to arrange payment then lmao.
Invoices are legally binding documents in many countries, and even if that might not be the case in your country, not everyone might be aware of that fact.
> since it gives their AP team a real cost to work from instead of a ballpark of us vs. GitHub
Same could be achieved by showing the real cost in the web app and/or sending a report via email, without scaring them away, and possibly _extorting_ them.
> Alternatively, for larger contracts, You may request to be billed via invoice.
> By providing payment information, You authorize us to charge Your credit card for usage fees or, in the case of invoice-based contracts, agree to make timely payments as specified in the invoicing terms.
And at the top there's a Try For Free button that says no credit card is required. This strongly communicates that this free trial won't incur any costs until you add a card or agree to be billed via invoice.
A simple change of the text would make people a lot less surprised. Warn them that if they go over they will be billed. In the bill clarify at the top that they don't actually have to pay if they don't want to.
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 dedicated line it didn't actually need a power connection, as the power through the phone wire was sufficient.
AOL was offering free minutes because it was an ISP, not because it was an online service. (It was also an online service. Most of that service was indeed free; some of it billed by the minute, but that was separate from the rate you paid for connecting to the internet.)
The telephone network made the utterly bizarre choice to intentionally degrade the audio signal of a call, guaranteeing that people would have an unnatural, distorted voice if you spoke to them over the phone. There was no way for voip not to be better quality.
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.
Since Amex is nice about allowing someone who charged you in the past - keep charging you even as your card has changed, they allow the charge.
Every year I do a chargeback, every year. Amex can't figure out how to not allow it and B&N has no idea why they charge it. Hmmm...
Generally, you don't want to award people/companies that don't respect you. I'm not saying that you shouldn't re-evaluate them in the future, but they will walk away with the wrong lesson if you just start throwing money at them.
Several months later, I learned at that time, that they had instituted a standing stop payment order to the merchant we were paying, but only in the amount of exactly $600. Fast forward, we make a $600 payment, get a notification that it went through, no notification of stop payment, but later a notification from the merchant we were trying to pay (Synchrony - Amazon Store Card) stating they were closing our account due to the stop payment.
Meet in person with a bank rep. They have trouble finding the problem, but once found, argue that we must have requested this specifically, for they would never have done such a thing. I didn't even know a standing stop payment for a specific amount was a thing, asked what is normal policy, what bank terminonlogy would cause such a thing. Would not give any answer other than "you must have asked for it". What would I have said? "You must have asked for it" etc.
Currently fighting with the bank for audio of the phone call where they claim we requested this, and with Synchrony telling them it is the bank's fault. We immediately paid balance on closed Synchrony account, and had made ~12 payments successfully before the inadvertent stop payment.
I can never remember if overdraft protection means "we won't let your account overdraft", or "we will let your account overdraft"
It is an incredibly confusing name to me
I could look up the answer now, but I know I will just forget it again. I must have looked it up and then forgotten at least 10 separate times over the years
Or, it might be a case where they grant you a short-term personal loan to cover the overdraft (up to some limit) rather than return checks. Again there will be fees and interest on this.
In either case, since they are not rejecting payments, you avoid getting hit with fees from whomever you wrote the check to. So your only fees/penalties are paid to the bank.
Of course the best answer is just keep better track of your checking account balance.
Basically, in most countries paying money is something that requires continuous enthusiastic consent - if you don't pay, that's the business's problem and they should stop serving you, and they may only recover payment for goods they've already given you and not received payment for. But in DACH, it only requires technical consent - if you signed something saying you'll give them money, then you have to give them that money, and you cannot rescind your obligation to pay, except as provided in the contract or an overriding law.
You went to Austria and did Austrian business with an Austrian company, you should be aware that Austrian rules and norms apply. ccTLDs are not generic, every country is free to apply any rules on their ccTLD!
The consumer purchases a domain name from their registrar. Neither the consumer nor their registrar are in Austria. The registrar is the one providing the service of registering the domain with the NIC. The NIC can't just say "we have a contract directly with the consumer".
The registrar can write in their contract that "consumer must cancel domain before it expires with the NIC" or "consumer must sign contract with NIC", and if the consumer doesn't do that then the registrar can maybe (depending on consumer and contract law in their jurisdictions) sue the consumer if they don't fulfil the contract of sale. But writing in one contract that the consumer must sign a third-party contract doesn't imply that the third-party contract actually exists. The NIC cannot go after the consumer because they don't have any contract with the consumer.
I agree domain registrars should display a warning. They often display other warnings, like that certain TLDs require verified addresses or that they don't allow WHOIS privacy.
Rather more complicated to cancel that service than I would've wished, but hey, I got a better banking service out of the deal, so it's not all bad I guess
Being unable to tell how to cancel something is a different thing. You can contact their support. If they don't have support, or the support refuses, then you contact your bank, with evidence, because it's now an unauthorized payment.
This is separate from the cultural norm that you can only cancel with a certain notice period or by fax.
If you view it through a paying customer lens instead, then all you see is a paying customer who chose not to pay their invoice and might get sued. There's nothing strange about that.
All of the problem here was with the transition from free trial to paying customer.
Which of course is about as odorous fee as possible. You don't have enough money, so we're going to charge you more money?
I do a chargeback every year. <sigh>
Why did you think Let's Encrypt suddenly blocked Iran? It isn't because their board members have the same ideological alignment.
Let’s Encrypt evidently didn’t mean to block all of Iran, only the Iranian government, which I assume is capable of getting its own certificates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465754