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Comment by elliotpage | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the post author that the tactic of allowing users to exceed plan limits and then upping their bill (yes, even with the 7 day notice email) is shady.

I hate this kind of behaviour from my tools - it feels like I am constantly being watched for when I "slip" and can be charged more without recourse. If you are going to use this behavior, provide a switch to enable hard limits on usage so a user cannot blunder unto having their budget blown by accident.

Edit: Also, why does the CEO have direct access to cancel user accounts and send them direct messages? Surely they have more important things to do?

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> Also, why does the CEO have direct access to cancel user accounts and send them direct messages? Surely they have more important things to do?

Not every company is a 100k employees company with CEO deatached from mudane operations - why would not a CEO of a small company be involved in customer support etc.

Though in particular this case, customer care is not his strong side :)

It can happen in big companies too, like in this old post of Raymond Chen "Can I talk to that William fellow? He was so helpful" https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=15...

> Also, why does the CEO have direct access to cancel user accounts and send them direct messages? Surely they have more important things to do?

They're probably still a small start up, where lots of people still do multiple roles.

>They're probably still a small start up

Sounds like they are determined to stay small.

Yeah, no wonder. Shooting down paying customers while in startup phase? I'm all for firing annoying/needy (service) customers but this is far from being the case here.

It’s clearly a lifestyle business that enables John to bounce around South East Asia.

In many alternative scenarios you hit a sudden spike in traffic that could make your business thousands and the hosting company starts blocking people from accessing your site because you exceeded the quota.

7 day notice of upgrading seems much more reasonable in that case

That is fine IF you warn your customer about scaling BEFORE the customer gives you the credit card.

This system does make sense for some customers, it does not for others, some will agree and subscribe to the service, some will not.

> That is fine IF you warn your customer about scaling BEFORE the customer gives you the credit card.

Ghost is pretty clear on their signup pages. For example, if you go over your traffic limits:

https://ghost.org/pricing/

> Average views per month

> Views refer to the number of requests to your site each month. These are tracked much like an analytics 'pageview' - and are incremented with each page or API request.

> We never disable sites for traffic spikes, so no need to worry about the front page of Reddit or HN. If you exceed your limit consistently on a 3 month rolling average, we'll just let you know that you need to upgrade.

And for staffing:

> Staff users

> Staff users refers to the total number of active team members invited to Ghost Admin whom you collaborate with. For the purposes of billing, we only count staff users who have logged in at least once in the last 30 days.

> If you have lots of authors of posts who are not logging into Ghost Admin on a regular basis, they won't count towards your plan limits.

And if you don't want to upgrade they tell you how to avoid it before charging.

My mistake, you absolutely are right

There is a purple section "Our simple + fair billing policy" that is pretty clear.

I actually looked at the pricing page before commenting, but somehow missed that

I agree that this is hard to find. When I visit the site there are tiny, very pale, question marks that expand these boxes.

>There is a purple section "Our simple + fair billing policy" that is pretty clear.

I don't know. Some of the wording doesn't seem consistent with what happened.

>We simply email you to let you know when it's time to upgrade.

At least I don't think "it's time to upgrade" means that "we are upgrading you".

“...we’ll just let you know that you’ll need to upgrade,” sounds very much opt in (or lose services), while the author was instead told he will be upgraded unless he opted out.

That’s a distinction that certainly matters to me. I’d be upset in the author’s shoes.

Only if you exceed your traffic limit consistently on a 3 month rolling average will they even try to upgrade you. That seems very fair to me. OP is trying to make this about traffic but it's really because he knowingly had more then 2 active staff accounts.

OP clearly states that it's about the active staff accounts.

The concern is still valid -- they claim 3 months of excess before attempting an upgrade but give 7 days warning as soon as you go over the staff limit? They should either limit the staff amounts or give you longer than 7 days.

The page says "you can pick a plan later" and that users can "upgrade", which implies to me that people opt into and manually control the pricing plan they want. But what they have actually behaves more like usage tiers in reality.

It also says that staff are considered active if they've used the product within the last 30 days. How could the OP get usage back below the threshold with only 7 days notice?

By removing those accounts

Fine for a business, but for a personal blog I'd rather have visitors temporarily blocked than get a huge bill. Such a blog doesn't make money.

> I hate this kind of behaviour from my tools

Things which behave like this are not your tools. They belong to someone else. The tool is you, for using them.

Ghost is open source and self-hostable, so you can very much make it your tool.

Like the person I was commenting, I was making a general statement, not talking about Ghost in particular.

> I agree with the post author that the tactic of allowing users to exceed plan limits and then upping their bill

It's only the same as pay-per-use, which loads of other companies use. If you use network bandwidth on AWS or GCP, they're going to bill you per gigabyte, and there is no 7 day grace period or action required on your part to get a big bill.

On AWS, I sign up to be billed at per gigabyte. I don't sign up for a 100 GB bandwidth bucket and at 101 GB AWS automatically upgrades me to the 1000 GB bucket.

AWS has exactly the same problem with not allowing you to limit spend. And lots of individuals and small businesses are uncomfortable with using it for that reason.

Yeah, google cloud provides a page to programatically cap your spending: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...

Why don't they just provide a big red button to enable caps instead?

> Why don't they just provide a big red button to enable caps instead?

So many companies have departmental budgets and need the ability to guarantee a bill not more than $X.

It seems crazy GCP doesn't have a budget limit option. In fact, AppEngine used to have a budget limit option, and they've just removed it!

> AppEngine used to have a budget limit option, and they've just removed it!

awful behaviour!

Looks like there is someone stealing identities, Mr Graham ^^

Are you saying that there is only one person legally allowed to be called Graham Paul in the whole planet?

Well, letting customers spend money on their platform earns them money

That's true but in this instance, you can set up a max cap limit after which there would be no cap limit. I don't think google will gain much from trying to fish students and small businesses for, say $250.

Doesn't this do what you are referring to?

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...

That just sends you an alert when your spend reaches certain points, it doesn’t stop you from exceeding it, and there is a one day delay while they reconcile usage.

Most people wouldn’t want to stop operating completely even if they exceed a budget so it’s really more for monitoring.

People who do want that are probably better off renting a server for a fixed cost - plenty of places still do that.

Cloud makes more sense if you are growing rapidly or have short term needs for significant increases in computing power.

At some point after that cloud stops making sense and it becomes cheaper again to host your own infrastructure.

It's not pay per use or does Ghost downgrade the tier when he'd stopped using the extra staff accounts automatically within 7 days too? Don't think so. It's an illegal practice to upsell someone without consent.

You say that like it's not the #1 complaint about using AWS/GCP for personal stuff.

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