[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.