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by ALittleLight 492 days ago
Looking at your urlbox - pretty funny language around the quota system.

>What happens if I go over my quota?

>No need to worry - we won't cut off your service. We automatically upgrade you to the next tier so you benefit from volume discounts. See the pricing page for more details.

So... If I go over the quota you automatically charge me more? Hmm. I would expect to be rejected in this case.
1 comments
jot 492 days ago
I’m sure we can do better here.

In my experience our customers are more worried about having the service stop when they hit the limit of a tier than they are about being charged a few more dollars.

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ALittleLight 492 days ago
Maybe I'm misreading. It sounds like you're stepping the user up a pricing tier - e.g. going from 50 a month to 100 and then charging at the better rate.

I would also worry about a bug on my end that fires off lots of screenshots. I would expect a quota or limit to protect me from that.

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jot 492 days ago
That’s right. On our standard self-service plans we automatically charge a better rate as volume increases. You only pay the difference between tiers as you move through them.

It’s rare that anyone makes that kind of mistake. It probably helps that our rate limits are relatively low compared to other APIs and we email you when you get close to stepping up a tier. If you did make such a mistake we would, like all good dev tools, work with you to resolve. If it happened a lot we might introduce some additional controls.

We’ve been in this business for over 12 years and currently have over 700 customers so we’re fairly confident we have the balance right.

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ALittleLight 491 days ago
I'm not a customer, so don't take what I say too seriously, but to me it seems like you are unilaterally making a purchasing decision on my behalf. That is, I agreed to pay you 50 dollars a month and you are deciding I should pay 100 (or more) - to "upgrade" my service. My intuition is that this is probably not legal, and, if I were a customer, I would not pay for a charge that I didn't explicitly agree to - if you tried to charge me I would reject it at the credit card level.

If I sign up for a service to pay X and get Y, then I expect to pay X and get Y - even if my automated tools request more than Y - they should be rejected with a failure message (e.g. "quota limit exceeded").

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