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Comment by penjelly | Hacker News Reader

requires a credit card but costs nothing, their reasoning sounds alright to me

https://fly.io/blog/free-postgres/#a-note-about-credit-cards

Lovely! "Your credit card number is the thin plastic line between us and chaos".

I agree I'm thinking also making people pay for stuff is important. It's hardly like fly.io don't have a good reputation, I trust them and it does seem reasonable requirement to help them stop people destroying their platform with crypto mining!

Abuse prevention has a cost, otherwise we can't have nice things.

Better than other abuse prone services, such as Hetzner or OVH, which require you to take a selfie holding your national ID card.

I was blind-robbed by a German company because of that. I paid a full year, was never given access,I "opened" a ticket and they answered a full week later asking me to fill 2 forms with lots PIID+ national ID card + Credit card, I told them to get lost. For being a supposedly modern, democratic society Germany seems very backward regarding online things, it is not surprised that for a economy of its size and influence the number of truly innovative "modern" online companies is rather low.

BTW, if someone knows of an HONEST company that provides online fax US numbers (Damn you IRS) I am all ears.

Was it PamFax? I used them for my one-time personal use over 10 years ago...

Yes, see what they wrote after fully charging me and refusing a charge back:

> There are some security issues with your account. We need to verify the > account holder in order to unlock your account again. > Please send us a scanned photo ID of the account holder and also a Letter of > authority (LOA). It is required that the entered account information are > also shown on the proof. > We will then enable your PamFax account immediately.

Merchants can't just refuse a chargeback. The entire point of a chargeback is that it's clawing money back from an unwilling merchant.

Not with a debit card without insurance.

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