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Comment by yummypaint | Hacker News Reader

I can assure you that absolutely no-one "likes" being charged a full years subscription in advance.

We're working on extending the free trial / moving to a freemium model.

Please. You aren't spaceX "working on" your next engine, or AMD "working on" the next processor architecture. All you have to do to end the unethical behavior is flip a few bits in a database. Don't pretend it's some kind of grand technical challenge.

You're luring in people who are trying to improve their mental health and tricking them out of their money. The product isn't even technically innovative. No idea why YC is compromising its brand like this.

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While criticism can be good when constructive, I think these comments are a bit dramatic and make way too many assumptions.

I would expect that it's more financially lucrative to have a happy userbase, which translates to a good reputation and thus larger user-base, rather rip-off a few who will eventually give bad reviews and create a bad reputation. To me the current pricing model sounds more like a bad decision rather than anything else. But in any case, if I didn't like it I would just not use it, rather than throwing accusations around on malicious intentions without having any evidence.

PS: I am not even remotely affiliated with the creators of that app

If you worked towards the higher standard, of trying to avoid even the potential appearance of inappropriate action, you would never do what they did.

Deep down do you believe that they would have changed if not for this public outcry?

Make it free for 30 days THEN throw up a pay screen. You're a funded startup what's the issue here?

Agreed, and that's what I would expect too. In fact, if the app works as they claim to be, users would rush to subscribe after the 30 day trial. Yet, criticism doesn't necessarily need to be accompanied with unjustified accusations and demands. I find this attitude to be a very common pattern nowadays. Criticism can be constructive and to the point without any of these.

> To me the current pricing model sounds more like a bad decision rather than anything else.

I'd ordinarily be willing to believe that, but I can't stop thinking: this is a service with a very specific target market - people with a condition whose defining characteristic is being vulnerable to be exploited through the exact payment model that Inflow has chosen. To accept this as a honest mistake is to believe that they never thought about their target audience at all, which is inconsistent with their claims of having people with deep understanding of the condition on board.

> But in any case, if I didn't like it I would just not use it, rather than throwing accusations around on malicious intentions without having any evidence.

Startups are getting way too much mileage from Hanlon's razor.

Quite possibly. But still, what happened to personal responsibility? Having ADHD does it mean I have no judgement at all. If I evaluated the risk of forgetting is too high, I could choose not to subscribe in the first place. Or if I still think this app is important enough, I could make sure I find another way to be reminded to cancel.

What I mainly question is the demand culture, that a lot of users have towards developers - even towards people voluntarily put their time to do opensource work.

it might sound really strange, but remembering to cancel something like this is incredibly hard for me as someone with ADHD. I pay for so many things, sometimes multiple times before I can work up the energy (and memory) to take care of something like this.

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