[zephen]

tl;dr:

"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.

[hitekker]

Billing statements disguised as marketing nudges is a cromulent business practice until the SaaS start sending bills to collections.

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.

[zephen]

> Billing statements disguised as marketing nudges is a cromulent business practice until the SaaS start sending bills to collections.

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.

[namenotrequired]

It would be perfectly crumulent if it was explicitly communicated in advance.

[zephen]

There are two possibilities here:

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.

[gblargg]

> 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.

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.

[zephen]

I mean, the dude didn't even try to say he wasn't warned:

> 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.

[gblargg]

> I mean, the dude didn't even try to say he wasn't warned:

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.

[zephen]

The question is, is not immediately disrupting service a courtesy, or a dark pattern?

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.

[inigyou]

What's incromulent about suing people who racked up debts to you?

[zephen]

If you read the other comments, you're certainly an outlier in this belief.

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.

[inigyou]

I find that exploiting a difference between expectations and reality is a common way to make money, but I'm no good at it myself. I'm cursed with engineer-brain instead of business-brain.

[zephen]

> exploiting a difference between expectations and reality is a common way to make money

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.

[inigyou]

Yes, lots of people who don't frequent HN think their real estate agent is on their side, and think car dealerships just sell cars for a fair price. They might even think politicians make laws to make society better.

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.