Hacker News Reader

Comment by RyanKearney | Hacker News Reader

>I called GoDaddy Support this Sunday afternoon. While it was a long distance call, I only had to wait about a minute to reach a person in their Billing Department. They were happy to refund me the $49.99 after I deleted the cert and sent me the instructions to disable auto-renewals I linked to above.

This times 1000

I experienced this exact same issue. I was pretty pissed to say the least but I called, got a human in about 60 seconds, and they refunded me as well as told me how to disable auto renew. I see no problem here.

View on HN

> I see no problem here.

Really, you don't see a problem with their "better ask forgiveness than permission" tactic?

> Really, you don't see a problem with their "better ask forgiveness than permission" tactic?

uh, isn't that what PG and all the other people here constantly say is what you should do in business?

Not with my money. You taking my money without specifically asking means that I will never, ever do business with you again. (And that I'll specifically warn other people against dealing with you.)

"It's better to ask forgiveness than permission" is not a universal truth to be applied to every aspect of startups/tech work. It is often a good idea when there's a lot of bureaucratic red tape and/or you need to get approval from other people about things. This is a very different situation: you're charging your customers ~4x more than they originally paid for something automatically. Are there other companies that do this sort of thing? Sure. Maybe it makes sense financially, but it's not a good way to treat your customers.

I might generalize that to say that "better to ask forgiveness than permission" just doesn't apply to customer relations.

To be honest, I have no interest in running a startup, so I avoid business-oriented threads. But I don't really believe that they advocate overcharging customers like this, with no warning.

If I'm wrong, please include a few citations and I'll admit it.

Yes. But, if you want me as a customer, you better hope that all your competition has similar business practices... otherwise you won't get me as a customer. It wouldn't surprise me if PG felt the same way when buying services; he just prefers to invest in companies with sharp business practices.

But, I guess that makes me a bad customer from the point of view of an investor. There are plenty of people who will just take it, and I can certainly see why investors would prefer to focus on those people.

It's also important to note that not everyone in the community shares similar standards. Hell, over time the same person might not even have similar standards.

Another thing I think he says (can't find a reference right now) is not to piss off existing customers.

Just run the arbitrage between 200+% incremental revenue on one side and % of customers lost + cost of customer service calls for customers who talk them back down to the original price. I'm pretty sure that the former will win for a business like GoDaddy. Let's face it -- their entire checkout process is designed to generate incremental revenue and it's been optimized to balance vs. abandoned checkouts. Doesn't exactly reek of high regard for the customer. Reeks of maximizing revenue.

Not many people will see a problem in this as other people's money usually rank below one's own.

I'm playing devil advocate here: You should do research before you buy things. And it seems that the author knew Godaddy is notorious for shady practices.

"Caveat Emptor" doesn't excuse shady business practices. If I lose my money to a scam artist, I may be partially to blame, but that does not mean that the scam artist is excused, from a moral point of view.

Yes, but I'd not call what Godaddy doing scam. The practice of discounting first payment is popular with subscription business model, to lure customer into signing up. I don't know what the situation in the US is, but here in Germany for example a lot of newspapers often try to get people signed up with first two weeks for free, after 2 weeks you will be billed. Annoying it is, if you don't read the fine-print, but it doesn't make the practice illegal.

I called, got a human in about 60 seconds, and they refunded me as well as told me how to disable auto renew. I see no problem here.

Three problems: 1) You had to notice the price change. If you have never not noticed anything, then you might have gotten taken. 2) You had to have the will to object. Willpower is a limited commodity. Is vendor bullshit what you could best be spending it on? 3) Your time is worth something, and GoDaddy just wasted it because they can make more money that way.

At my company, our rough rule of thumb is that a technical person's time is worth $250/hr. (We don't pay them that much, but we care more about opportunity cost.) Even if GoDaddy's shenanigans only take 10 minutes, that's still $41.67 lost. And that's not even counting the fact that next time I do something with them I have to spend time figuring out how they're going to try to cheat me.

Dealing with asshole vendors is rarely worth it once you take everything into account.

yeah, even though godaddy does some weird stuff sometimes they do get it resolved quickly and without trouble.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com