DigitalOcean is removing most referral credits that you may have accumulated

I'm about to lose $4,800 in credits from Digital Ocean. I've been promoting them on my blog for the past 5 years or so

Something that I found weird is that they mentioned on the email I received:

> Please note that since all of your referral credits were issued more than 12 months ago, they will all expire starting next week.

Either the wording is odd or it's just my interpretation, but from what I understood they are implying that all my credits are older than 12 months

But the thing is I have several credits issued this year:

May 06, 2021 April 07, 2021 March 08, 2021 February 02, 2021 January 08, 2021

Or they consume the credits from newer to older.

Yep, about to lose just shy of $1k here, and it stinks of bad business.

Linode and Hetzner it is for us, just as a FU back to their FU.

Update: I heard back from DigitalOcean, and they're going to extend my credits through the end of the year.

"We would like to extend your referral credits referenced in the previous email through December 31, 2021. This specifically includes those credits which were set to expire on May 25th due to lack of use. Any new credits earned through the referral program will be subject to the 12 month expiration policy."

I don't know if they're going to do this automatically, so you might want to reply to their email.

This isn't perfect, but the rest of the year gives me more flexibility than one week. Hopefully I can use them up.

Purging credit amassed over years with only a week of prior notice sounds really, really wrong.

You're not the only one. I am losing almost $500 in credits. I definitely won't be promoting them anymore. Guess I'll need to start looking for another company for my websites.

Linode has similar pricing and performance at the same price. They have very similar services, including Kubernetes, but not including databases.

They've been in business for longer than DO and are profitable.

My referral link: https://www.linode.com/?r=0d2070f132f02d20a51d54ad971cba7a50...

Comparison: https://www.linode.com/digitalocean-vs-linode/

Performance benchmark: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/docean_vs_linode

Someone who follows me on Twitter DM'd me and mentioned they are about to lose $7,400 in credits.

I don't care about karma or anything but I really hope this post hits the front page because this is a case of a publicly traded company benefiting from years of the community heavily promoting them and then now they're negating all of that, and stealing back all of those years of credits. It's like them directly reaching into your bank account and taking out that money because the transaction has already occurred to refer the customer to them.

The main issue is DO only offers referral payouts in the form of credits. Most other companies would pay out referrals over ACH or PayPal, not credits.

I tried DO a few years ago, but every page on their site required me to enable a bunch of 3rd-party domains in NoScript.

I switched to Vultr. Only 1 domain to enable for all their pages and they have also been very reliable. I only use it for test VMs, but just leave one running because it's only $2.50 a month or something.

I have a Linode VM too for production (HashBackup update server) and am really happy with them. At the time, Linode didn't have ultra cheap VMs, though it does now.

Could be the IPO effect which happened in late March. Their stock has dipped from $41 to $37 as of today and perhaps there is pressure from the investors to cut costs ? Just a guess.

Not too surprising (it's a big liability sitting around in the books), but introducing this on short notice is kinda crappy. ... as if short notice that hadn't been an issue the last time they started expiring credits: https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/details-on-expiring-digita...

I was just looking at a good host for my next project. Was considering DO, Linode, and Vultr.

DO was top of the running (along w/ Linode), but this makes me reconsider. I guess I will go with Linode, instead.

Makes sense in hindsight. DO took the great Linode business model then injected it with VC magic. Was only a matter of time before they needed to turn things around and translate any good will into sweet, sweet returns.

VC "magic" is a road paved in fool's gold that always leads to hell.

Well, I guess I'll take down the DO referral link on my website and maybe consider moving everything back to Linode. I don't have anywhere near the referrals you do, but if all of my pending referrals went through I don't think I could spend it all within a year. I suppose this is a good reason to always prefer referral and affiliate programs that offer cash payments instead.

It appears that Digital Ocean changed their TOS in 2015 to reflect that all credits expire 12 months after they are issued.

See https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/are-tos-cha...

My understanding is those were promotional credits. Now they're doing the same thing with referral credits. I guess we shouldn't be surprised, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I will be moving to one of their competitors ASAP.

Ah, thank you for explaining.

Yeah, that's shady.

I don’t know if DO sells “gift cards”, but are “credits”different in practice?

Iirc, at least in the US, gift cards cannot legally expire.

I wonder if this is due to a change in accounting or such. I would imagine an action like this in response to being told that they had to account for these 1:1 as a liability, or even just a need to reduce these liabilities.

However I imagine they haven't planned to reduce their brand equity like this move will do

Screwing customers is what companies do when they became big enough to continue attract new customers despite screwing up the old ones.

Every big company does that almost like it was part of their business model.

Everybody knows it but ignores it because it's happening with someone else until it's happening to them.

Nothing new here.

I am unfamiliar with Digital Ocean credits. What were you using them for, or going to use them for?

Have you been spending them or just amassing them?

(Not that either would justify summarily wiping them out. Just trying to understand.)

I was using them to run my own server. I used to pay them in cash, but I earned so many credits by referring people to them that I haven't paid them in years. I've also often thought about starting my own SaaS, and those credits would have helped keep my costs down.

I have been continuously using the credits for years to host my blog (300+ technical posts) and podcast (80+ episodes).

In previous years certain articles were more popular than they are today so a majority of my credits were gained over a year ago.