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Comment by King-Aaron | Hacker News Reader

This could easily cripple people on low incomes. Not good enough for a company the size of Google.

The flow-on damage of billing errors like this can be immense. Ive seen it first hand, and the people working for these companies generally have no idea how much an overdraft fee can ruin someone’s life in the short/medium term.

If the refund isn’t fast enough it also leads to missed rent and bills, all of which have fees for being late, plus possible debt collector issues as most utility companies will send a single missed bill directly to collections these days.

Not to mention inability to buy food, gas/transport to work, etc.

This should be illegal, or at the very least, Google should be required to reimburse any fees incurred as a result of this misstep. When you hand over your bank account to an organization, especially one as legitimate as Google, you are doing so with the implicit trust that they will charge you what you expect them to charge you for. Breaching this trust should have consequences, just like individuals failing to pay their rent has consequences.

Maybe google should just get banned from doing wire transfers to and from personal bank accounts for a couple of years.

Just like everyone else that fucks up like this.

What should be illegal is overdraft fees themselves. They are nothing but a flimsy pretext to steal money from customer accounts.

It is possible to find checking accounts that will treat negative balances as simple interest-only loans. At least one of the major online banks does this if you set it up that way.

> This could easily cripple people on low incomes.

To keep this in perspective, Google Fi costs substantially more than every other phone plan unless you travel internationally on a regular basis.

I'm curious how you arrived at this conclusion.

Google Fi costs me substantially less than any other phone plan (that I'm aware of).

Perhaps if a person used a lot of mobile data (at $10/GB) it would. But I'm on WiFi for the most part with moderate mobile data usage and my bills are usually around $30/month or slightly less. Compared to $70+ GF pays.

Google Fi has a max data cost too. I think is around $60 for an individual.

I pay around $35/month, is that substantially more than every other phone plan? I am planning to switch off in the future though, for whatever privacy gains are possible through avoiding Google.

AT&T prepaid is $40/mo for 8GB of data (with the auto-pay discount) So if you use 2GB or more of data, it can be cheaper that Fi (though without the free international roaming)

That sounds like 1.5GB of data/month? You can probably beat that with a MVNO, but not any of the main US carriers. Extreme example being like mint mobile which does bulk purchases (3,6,12months) and goes down as cheap as $15/month for 3GB of LTE.

If you have Comcast home internet, you might be able to use Xfinity Mobile (only BYOP for iPhone atm but they do have a few $100 backs for some phones on their site). It costs $0 for calling/text and $12/gig.

T-mobile is $40 per month with unlimited data, and $30 per month if you have 4+ lines.

The only single line unlimited plan I see at T-Mobile is $70/month.

You can easily find 3 other people.

Try Red Pocket, Mint, or H2O. They use ATT or T Mobile. The month to month plans are lower than Fi. For bigger saving, get the longer term plans. Sometimes they have sales on Black Friday for deep discount. People would buy the yearly plans on Black Friday, wait until their current plans expire and activate the new plans.

I switched to Google Fi specifically because the monthly bill would be much cheaper for me than other options. And I've been using for a years now and this has held true.

I hardly ever use cellular data services (because wi-fi is everywhere).

YMMV on usage patterns, how much you consume data when not connected via wi-fi, etc, but its simply wrong to say that Google Fi costs more than other options.

I don't use it, but it's probably great for people who use minimal mobile data, and perhaps a few other random use cases.

Google Fi is one of the cheapest phone plans on the market. Other comparably expensive phone plans are often deliberately made hard to buy by providers or sold by technically incompetent MVNOs.

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