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by jsaxton86 4545 days ago
Here's what Space Monkey promised on their kickstarter page[1]: "Space Monkey is the next generation cloud. For $10 per month, you get a full Terabyte (1000 Gigabytes) of storage you can use anywhere, any time."

No device is promised, and even after re-reading his blog post, I'm not sure what emil10001's argument is. He feels he owned his Space Monkey, because what? Because he felt that he should own it? Because there wasn't a big red font on the kickstarter page that said "YOU DO NOT OWN THE DEVICE!!!"?

Maybe emil10001 has a point and Space Monkey is running a huge scam. That, of course, is premised on the assumption that Space Monkey sold him a device, then insisted he didn't own it. Emil10001 has provided no evidence that this is the case. That's not hyperbole, go reread his blog post. It's like a kid throwing a temper tantrum because he isn't getting his way. I can't believe this is getting upvoted on HN.

[1]: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clintgc/space-monkey-tak...

1 comments

> No device is promised

------------------

"Early-bird special. 1 Terabyte of Space Monkey storage for 12 months (device included in your subscription)."

Obviously there are two ways of taking that -

1) You don't have to buy a device to use the service

or

2) that the purchase of the device is included in the subscription.

Considering the trivial nature of claim 1, claim 2 is not an entirely unreasonable interpretation for someone to have come to.

Unfortunately, the Kickstarter platform does not allow you to change the descriptions for reward levels once you've pushed the project live (you can add new rewards, but cannot remove or modify old ones).

This KS policy makes sense: they don't want people doing switch-n-bait on rewards.

But the very real consequence is that if the wording on a reward was not 100% clear, the only option Space Monkey had after publishing it was to add text to the product description on the main page, in the forums, or in updates. This is how Kickstarter works. Our hands were tied from changing that text, even though we wanted to.

Of course it's not unreasonable. Space Monkey said many times that they are unhappy about the clarity of the issue and thus offered a full refund with shipment at their cost to anyone who wanted it.