[marcamillion]

Ok this is going too far. Did Heroku make a mistake? Yes. Did they mislead and lie to their customers? Yes. But is it worth pursuing a class action lawsuit that could ultimately ruin them - if not financially, but force their mgmt team to focus on this damn suit rather than fixing the damn problems? Hells no.

I hope RapGenius is not the lead plaintiff in this, otherwise I will be very disappointed.

I applaud them for raising this issue, and doing all the research they did. We are all much better off for it.

I applaud them for sticking to their guns to make sure Heroku fixes the issue.

But if they join this class action suit, in my humble opinion, it is one step too far. What is the max they can realistically expect to get back from Heroku? $250K? $500K? Surely not the entire $20K/mo, so I doubt it will be that much.

Given all the money they have raised so far, if I were one of their investors I would start to ask questions about if they are wasting their time frivolously beating a dead horse.

This is getting into 'bad karma' territory. I am sure someone, at some point, will want to sue RapGenius....they may remember how they behave now.

So yes, keep up the pressure, and keep forcing Heroku to fix their faulty systems.

But a class action suit dawg? I think not.

[redguava]

They blatantly lied about how a core part of their service worked for years. It was raised to them previously and they didn't change the docs nor the way their system worked.

This negatively affected a lot of their customers in many ways (overspending on heroku, time wasted, lost customers and revenue).

When Heroku's customers have incurred significant costs and/or losses because of Heroku's false claims, I don't see why this is so inappropriate. We need to make companies accountable for their claims.

For context, I am a Heroku customer and have been significantly affected by all of this. I won't participate in the lawsuit but I can understand why others would.

[marcamillion]

They didn't "blatantly lie"....they lied. They built their product 1 way and it morphed into another architecture as they grew. They made decisions that optimized for their financial benefit, but I wouldn't go as far as to say they "blatantly lied". Let's not get too carried away here.

As a long time Heroku user, I was pissed when I heard this...but they have done so much good for my own development career and freelance gigs, that this is easily forgiveable with a slap on the wrist and a partial refund to customers that have paid a lot over the years.

More than likely, they just never realized how big of a deal it was - because they were busy expanding. A few customers (few being relative to their total support requests) probably did inquire and some manager probably developed the response that they are aware of the problem, but not dealing with it right now.

It's not as if they built the company on the premise that they are going to say 1 thing and do something else.

This is just something that fell through the cracks as they grew.

Let's not blow it out of proportion.

[clivestaples]

Offering, and charging money for, a monitoring tool (New Relic) that doesn't monitor a very important part of the Heroku request cycle is pretty blatant. It was probably pretty profitable too!

EDIT: comma placement.

[ibrahima]

I agree completely, it's not like "intelligent routing" is some standardized feature that people have come to expect from Heroku. What people expected was that their app could scale easily on Heroku which as it happens was not strictly true, but to some extent below some threshold it was probably true for most people. People here keep showing a poor understanding of the basics of queueing theory and system administration, as if "intelligent routing" is something they purposely removed just to screw people over.

[redguava]

Think of it like this, if a food restaurant has a vegetarian burger on the menu. After a while they find that as they grow they can't keep producing the burger that way anymore. So they decide to use a beef product in the burger, but they don't tell anyone. They just keep selling it as a vegetarian burger. Do you think that is blatantly lying? I don't see a lot of difference here.

[gamblor956]

Heroku is owned by SalesForce, a publicly-traded multi-billion dollar company. It has annual revenues in the hundreds of billions.

They have the resources to handle the suit and fix the "damn problems" at the same time.

[bcgraham]

Salesforce does $3-4b in annual revenue.

[marcamillion]

So the size of their purse determines their legal liability? What difference does it make if it is a big multi-billion dollar company that does a few billion in revenue or a startup? If this were Dropbox, would people want to see a clas s action lawsuit too? Doubt it.

Regardless, the point has been made. They need to compensate those customers - but this lawsuit is frivolous, opportunistic and going too far.

[dreamdu5t]

When material damages happen as a result of fraud or breaking an agreement, then the party shares liability for those damages.

This is the right thing to do. Heroku made their bed and now they must lie in it.

[marcamillion]

Right...so compensating some of those customers - no biggie....I am down with that. But a class action lawsuit? Come on meng.

[throwawaysnipe]

Did Heroku make a mistake? Yes. Did they mislead and lie to their customers? Yes. But is it worth pursuing a class action lawsuit that could ultimately ruin them - if not financially, but force their mgmt team to focus on this damn suit rather than fixing the damn problems? Hells no.

Nice template for an emotional appeal you've got there, dawg (seriously, wtf are you going for with the vernacular embellishments)

Your argument justifies malfeasance without penalty for any entity. Swap out 'Heroku' for Monsanto, Microsoft, or banks that launder money for drug cartels and read it again. See if you still buy the reasoning. If misleading and lying to customers (your words) isn't enough for a lawsuit, what is?

(Not saying Heroku is equivalent to any of the above companies, just illustrating the lack of reason in parent post).

[jrmiii]

Actually, it's unlikely it could ruin them. They are owned by SalesForce who can afford it. (likely part of the motivation for the class-action)

I think Heroku has done a tremendous amount of good, especially in the Ruby community. This needs to be considered with the bad.