Ask HN: Advice for a solo SaaS founder dealing with a customer?

[anon7331]

I am a solo founder/developer of a SaaS product. I have many customers (enterprise, small, medium, etc). I have never had this issue before now...

I have a customer that agreed to pay in N-days which is common for enterprise sales. However, this customer used our subscription/plan and refuses to pay (ghosting me at this point).

I believe the next step is writing a demand letter before officially bringing this to court. Does anyone have advice for a situation like this?

I have spoken to lawyers and they don't want to help (not quite enough cash for them to care, but a bit too much for small claims court as well...).

[bob1029]

My initial gut reaction is to not chase this one unless the amount of money is going to make/break your business. The amount of time & mental energy required to chase things like this can almost immediately overtake the original loss. Just do a simple calculation: Your hourly consulting rate X total hours spent dealing with this bullshit = The additional cost this asshole customer has incurred so far.

My red line for a 1-10mm USD business would be 25-50k USD. I would seek recovery at that threshold, and only if I had skin in the game (aka some substantial marginal cost per customer). If I got screwed out of "here's my enterprise pricing menu and here's some demo API access to the sandbox DB instance", I would not be so upset. However, if I got screwed out of hundreds of hours of deep consulting work, I would almost certainly lawyer up.

[anon7331]

I understand-- what about the use of a debt collector? Wouldn't it be better to settle for N, where N is greater than 0? Especially if the collector does all of the work/time investment?

[t312227]

if the amount of money you are talking of is not "world-shaking" for you:

just get over it!!

it makes no sense to go to court / take legal actions - its just not worth your money and time.

write it off as "premium of apprenticeship" or whatever it is called in english - in german we say "lehrgeld" -, if you lose money due to your own mistakes but got an opportunity to learn something.

idk ... write them a formal letter, announcing you are deleting their accounts / accesses / data in 2 or 3 months if they do not pay until n days in the future and move on!!

in the end: large companies have more money, can afford them better lawyers than you - if they are for example a financial-institution, maybe they even have their own business-unit filled with lawyers, who don't have anything else to do than to fight your claims and they are already on the companies payroll...

just my 0.02€

[anon7331]

I can somewhat understand the idea... but I don't see this as my mistake. A person agreed to pay for something. They signed an agreement. The payment terms were specified (N-30). The person used the product but decided not to pay.

Not sure what I can learn here, besides not allowing an enterprise access even if they have agreed to terms and signed the agreement... but that is not common. As far as I am aware, it's common to give an enterprise access as soon as the agreements have been signed.

[kjs3]

bit too much for small claims court as well

Disable/delete their account, make a note to never deal with them again and move on. If it's too small for small claims, it's too small to waste time on.

[anon7331]

The debt is too much for small claims court, not too little.

[kjs3]

Ack. Misread. My bad.

Still...fire that client hard.

[accrual]

Can you just drop/ban/block them?

[anon7331]

This has been done, but they already used all of the plan that was agreed upon.