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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think the argument was that he wanted the site to go dark. The author wanted them to block out offending features until the account was upgraded with purpose. Maybe an upsell screen overlay when he tried to add another staff member.

“To add more staff you need to upgrade your account, upgrade with 1 click here”

I don’t agree that it’s “shady” but you can already tell that it would negatively affect conversion to directly inform people of what they’re doing, rather than waiting for them to do it and then automatically upgrading them.

If you charge on some unknown, like requests per second, then it’s better to allow the user to set an upper bound on finances anyway.

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> I don’t think the argument was that he wanted the site to go dark.

There was an explicit dispute over this. The original email from Ghost was concerned with the number of active staff users, and the customer is definitely right that Ghost just shouldn't allow excess staff users rather than allowing them and then automatically increasing your bill.

But the two plans in question don't differ only by the permitted number of active staff users. They also differ by the permitted number of page views per month. And the customer explicitly asked "what happens if I post something that exceeds the number of page views allowed for my plan?".

So yes, the question of whether the site should go dark is very much in play.

> I don’t agree that it’s “shady” but you can already tell that it would negatively affect conversion to directly inform people of what they’re doing, rather than waiting for them to do it and then automatically upgrading them.

"shady" is an understatement, not an overstatement.

"If we auto-upgrade, there will be people who miss it or will be too apathetic or procrastinating to fix it, therefore better conversion rates" is on the bad side of "shady".

On the other hand, this gives a week or two (if not a month) to seed your site with a bunch of staff members and still be charged for a basic plan, once your site is done.

Still you're right that such warnings should not be side-channeled via email, but that can be just a mistake of a product design, not an intended tactic.

Ok, maybe shady implies intent that we couldn't possibly know. The approach is absolutely a dark pattern, intentional or not.

Either way, the CEOs response is such a giant red flag that any one who sees it should seriously reconsider doing business with him. He seems genuinely unstable.

  “To add more staff you need to upgrade your account, upgrade with 1 click here”

Can a Ghost user comment as to what you are told in the process of adding a rate-exceeding feature? Does it warn you that "this will result in a category upgrade if it persists over 7 days" or whatever?

The author talks about going viral. He also says that these higher plan features should just be disabled. To me that appears to mean that he wants his site to go dark if he goes over traffic limits.

Here's what Ghost does if you go over your traffic limits:

> 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.

I think this is pretty good? It would be better if they allowed the user to set a hard limit in advance.

>> 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.

> I think this is pretty good? It would be better if they allowed the user to set a hard limit in advance.

I agree that that's pretty good, although it still leaves you vulnerable to a page that goes viral enough to get triple the number of allowed views. That will block your 3-month rolling average for 3 months, but if your monthly traffic looks like this:

    Month 1:  50k views
    Month 2:  50k views
    Month 3: 400k views - no big deal, sometimes surges happen
    Month 4:  50k views - you know, you're starting to push your limits...
    Month 5:  50k views - OK, at this point, we need you to upgrade

At that point, the demand to upgrade looks pretty strange.

How else am I supposed to read his tweet? He asked what happens if his site goes viral directly after asking for the extra users feature to be blocked. I think it's ridiculous to look for some finely grained charging scheme from a start up.

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