[fireworks]

Are you allowed to inform paying customers that you are going to do this? This is my primary complaint here. I don't understand how this oversight happened. This is going to cause an enormous amount of time and energy to recover from this.

[yamtaddle]

> Are you allowed to inform paying customers that you are going to do this?

I can't be the only one who's basically completely blind to emails from major companies, including SaaS providers, because they're so fucking spammy that the SNR is like 1:99. Notifying me by email, for one of these places, is functionally the same as not notifying me at all.

[EDIT] Sorry, didn't mean to imply the parent wasn't paying attention, just that I'd fully expect a very high percentage of their users to miss the warning in all the noise even if they emailed everyone—even if they emailed them a couple times, actually. That's the cost of every company sending out tons of "join our online seminar on [product]!" and "hey, look, it's our newsletter you never read!" and "it's time for our weekly TOS modification!" emails.

[function_seven]

> ...because they're so fucking spammy that the SNR is like 1:99.

This 1000x. I signed up for an SMS gateway service last year. Just for my own hobby use, nothing major. I gave them $10 to start service, and they charge like 2¢ or something per outgoing message.

They have like 180 different prices for 180 countries, territories, provinces, parishes, cantons, prefectures, etc. Every week one of those prices changes, and I get an email notifying me of that. I tried to turn those off in my preferences, but they refused. I can opt out of marketing, weekly digests, and "tips and tricks"; but I can't opt out of pricing notices.

So I added a rule on my end to hide those. I totally understand where they're coming from. They can't NOT give pricing change warnings. But at the same time, in the flood of constant notices, there may be something major I will miss.

It would be nice if they instead gave me the option to never spend more than $0.XX per message, and return an API error if an attempted send fails for price threshold violation. Then the spam wouldn't be needed.

[yamtaddle]

Shit, that'd even let them optimize their pricing. "If we double this rate, 25% of our customers will start erroring, but factoring in message volume of those customers and assuming they all leave us, it'll still be a 60% increase in revenue from this product."

[fireworks]

I'm not blind, they didn't send one. And they admitted to me that they did not send one.

[yamtaddle]

Well, that's even worse, of course.

[eptcyka]

That's a major failure on their part. I did get several nagging emails from them.

[ehPReth]

Even if they did send it, email isn't guaranteed. What if it went to spam or was otherwise mishandled or missed?

[edgyquant]

I use heroku at work at they definitely sent out a ton of emails. It also said they were going to delete them right above all third party plugins (even if you weren’t using their database service)

[mst]

Right, but in this case - as confirmed by Heroku when contacted - something went wrong at their end and the emails weren't sent in the first place.

The fact that the failure to send a single warning email to this particular customer wasn't both detected and considered a five alarm fire level bug under the circumstances is the thing that moved the decision to sunset the free tier from sad to disastrous for the user who posted the Tell HN in the first place.