[tyrfing]

Absolutely absurd. I haven't touched it for 13 years, and just received an email that they will be billing me $31.25 with 6 hours warning. This, of course, is a few hours after an email saying that my "free subscription" will be expiring in a month, not within hours.

The kicker is that the billing FAQ 404s, the "account URL" 500s, and there is no apparent way to log in to the account that they are billing me for.

At this point the best I can do is hope they don't have any real PII to try to collect their bullshit bill.

[Beltalowda]

I'd just ignore it out of principle. They won't have a CC on file and I never agreed to these terms. Good luck collecting since what they're doing isn't legal in pretty much any jurisdiction, and I reject the idea that I need to take action to not be billed.

[tinus_hn]

It may or may not be defensible but chances are the terms of service you agreed to included a phrase that states they can make changes to those terms and you have to review them periodically or you’ll be deemed to have accepted them.

[antifa]

Luckily we live in "law is law" land and not "contract is law" land, and the law does take kindly to concepts like hotswapping concepts in a predatory manor.

[fuzzythinker]

Same here. It's was probably around 13 years as well, probably to try it out and never touched it since. My "account URL" shows 500 error as well. Here's the almost empty auto-reply if you reply to the email:

  Hi,

  Please reach out to the Fogbugz support team by visiting the following portal;

  https://support.fogbugz.com/hc/en-us/

  Thank you,

  Fogbugz team.

[sbarre]

"Just email everyone in the system, anyone who has ever given us an email address"

"Are you sure? Those really old accounts aren't even compatible with our current platform, they won't be able to even log in"

"Everyone!"

"Sigh..."

[heartbreak]

Their tagline of "Where software goes to live" is a little too on-the-nose.

[abeyer]

If you poke around in the support articles they mention the cause of this: they also deleted all idle accounts without notice and depending on when you got hit by that, might not even be able to recover it. So they're trying to bill you for a service that they can't even provide.

[anildash]

It’s a terrible move, and everyone should ignore the email. (Obviously, not legal advice, just my personal opinion.)

I don’t recommend anyone do business with them, whether as a customer or anything else; I was CEO of Fog Creek when we decided to sell FogBugz, and if I knew the difference between what we were told ahead of the deal and what happened after, I never would have approved it. I didn’t see that they’d done this latest shitty thing until now but I really lament that they’ve sunk to an even lower new level.

[alex_sf]

This is nonsense. You knew exactly what would happen.

[kyleee]

to phrase it a little nicer; they may not have technically known but that would be due to naivety / willfull blindness that there is at least of possibility of something like this happening, but the payout was worth more than the downside risks to the decision makers who stood to benefit

[alexjplant]

I'm more concerned about them affecting my credit score... these clowns haven't a legal or moral leg to stand on but there's no way to cancel the free account that I haven't touched for 7 years. The hyperlink to my instance 500s and their support portal is either broken or disallowing new user registrations (despite me trying three browsers, two devices, and spending 10 minutes in the dev console manually enabling various buttons for password setting on the new account page and trying their ZenDesk URL instead of the custom one). Any emails to their customer success address tell users to log into this nonfunctional support portal.

Me writing this post is 10% commiseration and 90% documentation for if I have to talk to a court or credit bureau.

[nieksand]

My last use of FogBugz was in 2012. After replying to FogBugz's fake bill, I noticed an auto-reply in my gmail spam:

Title: "Notification - Please visit support team"

Sender: "Sales and Success"

The short body declares that I have to go to their support portal.

I can't tell whether this stems from incompetence or if their aiming for Spam on purpose. Given their behavior, I assume the latter.

[djhn]

I recently noticed a collections agency sending emails that don't pass DKIM checks. Since the company's main business model is invoicing via email and their revenue is substantial, I'm positive it's malice, not incompetence. An intentional way of racking up late fees.

[classified]

That sonds like a case of cyber-villainy.