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Comment by exnuber | Hacker News Reader

So, if I follow this correctly... You sign up for a service, choose an account type that has restrictions, you exceed those, they have a soft limit with known and communicated consequences, they reach out how to avoid the consequence, you do nothing, and now you are angry?

What else should the company have done? Remove your additional accounts that exceeded the limits? Or, just allow over-usage without consequence? It's totally unclear what you think should have happened. I think the CEO actually responded very adequately. The owner of postapathy went over limits, they notified, and when no action was taken, their account are suspended, how is that not fair?

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Why would the company allow you to exceed these limits? We aren't talking about traffic here, just how many accounts they were able to have. When Netflix says you're allowed to watch two screens at once so you can share an account with family, isn't it unreasonable for Netflix to allow you to watch on three screens and then tell you your bill has doubled?

At a minimum, the CEO should have: emailed the customer telling them that the policies are non-negotiable and that the customer is free to disable accounts, increase the amount they pay, or cancel their subscriptions after the 7 days grace period ends. That is just basic professionalism.

What you really should do is address the core problem of how did a user get more accounts than their billing allowed - either grandfather them in if the price model changed or add a feature that prevents a user from exceeding their two allocated staff accounts (again we aren't talking about traffic, this is how many admin accounts the customer is allowed to have).

It says that they believe they shouldn't be allowed to add users if their service level doesn't allow it.

What's not clear from the article is how the extra charges of adding users is communicated. If you have two users and you attempt to add a third, does the site say "Your plan allows X users. By adding another, your plan you will be upgraded to Y which is $99", or does it say nothing, allow you to perform the action, and hope that you don't notice the email some time in the future. If so then, I see that as a bit of a dark pattern, others may believe that's perfectly acceptable.

As I understand it, it's the number of unique logins rather than accounts in existence that matters. It would still be good to have a "you've created more accounts than can login" on the final creation, and a warning on the final login to the effect of "this will incur additional charges".

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