[ImPostingOnHN]

Isn't that the point OP made, only repeated?: The price cap functionality which customers want, is missing, not for lack of feasibility or capability (as was previously claimed above), but because the company makes more money overcharging customers, and thus doesn't want to fix the problem.

[AnthonyMouse]

The cynical option isn't the only one.

Suppose it would cost them X million dollars a year to provide the feature and providing it would cost them nothing in terms of sales, and indeed get them a few more because people like the feature. Well, it still costs them that amount to provide it, so then the question is whether X is less than Y. But you don't control how much it costs them to implement it, only how much of your business you're going to take somewhere else without it, and if nobody is willing to do that then why would you expect them to spend the money?

It doesn't have to be that they're purposely screwing you. It's just that if you don't care enough to choose differently then why would they?

[ImPostingOnHN]

> The cynical option isn't the only one.

> Suppose it would cost them X million dollars a year to provide the feature and providing it would cost them nothing in terms of sales, and indeed get them a few more because people like the feature. Well, it still costs them that amount to provide it, so then the question is whether X is less than Y.

lol, that is the cynical option!

It's just "we profit more by charging people for overages than we would if we put in a price cap", with more words!

It's the same as making a subscription people can enroll in online, but cancelling it requires going to the HQ in person, or writing a registered mail demand letter, etc.

After all, why build a way to cancel online subscriptions online if X is more than Y? Maybe it's more profitable to keep charging people for something they don't want.

"The cynical option" is any option which consistently puts pure profitability ahead of doing the right thing by customers, society, or human decency in general, and that is precisely the Cloudflare decision criteria we're discussing.

[AnthonyMouse]

We can distinguish between two things, right?

1) They don't build it because they purposely want to screw customers with overage charges.

2) They don't build it because building it costs money and the customer demand (i.e. willingness to switch) over that feature isn't sufficient to justify the expense.

The first one is way more cynical than the second one.

[ImPostingOnHN]

The first one is a straw man, a cartoon villain misanthrope. If your point is "at least they hurt people for money, rather than out of savage hatred", I guess that is an optimistic way of seeing things.

The second one is what everyone here is talking about, and it is the cynical option. The non-cynical option would be doing the right thing every once in a while, even if it doesn't earn profits.