Tell HN: Fontawesome makes it impossible to downgrade to free plan | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Fontawesome makes it impossible to downgrade to free plan

23 pointsnkmnz8 comments

PSA: if you’re subscribed to fontawesome pro and plan to leave, don’t expect to be transferred to the free plan automatically. Instead, you will lose access to any kit created, even if it’s only a single one that should be covered by the free plan. Learned it the hard way, rendered my companies product useless for a couple of hours until I subscribed again for a full year so that I can migrate to a self hosted solution.

P.S.: customer support just confirmed that this happens on purpose. They obviously intend to harm people by suggesting a smooth transition to free via their pricing page. I’m probably not the only one who opted to renew for another period out of necessity.

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I feel for you on the level of that is a scary moment when things stop working.

And, I think it’s somewhat crummy of any company to not make downgrading a plan work as smoothly as possible.

However, you said this is for your company’s product, something you bring money in with? And it’s something that you were planning to migrate away from, but hadn’t yet?

I just would say that one - on the other side, why should their business support a paid product for free? I think it’s nice they do, but they could as easily not allow the free plan to be projects that make money.

Also, just as a business operations perspective, planning to migrate and migrating/migrated are very different things.

Also, $99 a year is cheap as a business expense if it’s bringing you in money.

Our fixed costs right now between tech, utilities, etc etc before come in at $4,500 ish per month. And I think we’re very frugal.

Understand different scales but…

Maybe I’m not understanding and I’m being overly critical? If so I apologize.

I like your attitude and you’re mostly right! The thing I criticise (from a customer perspective) is not the terms of a downgrade, it’s the deceitful communication while downgrading: “you can stay, you fit the free tier” - later: “oh, that free tier really does not exist for you, now pay a 100 bucks, haha”

From a business perspective, I think it’s not wise to treat long time customers that badly, I will never ever come back.

From a founder/builder perspective, I mostly criticise myself: the first subscription was justified, because the license for the icons themselves is perpetual and they are really nice imo. The mistake was to rely on their kits because they are so convenient - of course, 99$ seems cheap at first, but so is this and that and a server here and a paid SaaS there… Sometimes you need to clean up a bit :) the real mistake, however, was to allow the dependency on a provider for such a thing like icons. It would have been very easy to either 1. Self host them 2. Download them at build time instead of run time 3. Implement fallbacks if their servers go down.

$99 a year is cheap as a business expense if it’s bringing you in money.

Indeed. They could have paid for another 15 years of the service for just what it cost this one engineer to clean up from this mistake. Probably another 30 years worth to stand up and migrate to their own hosted version, assuming it never needs any maintenance whatsoever.

Hopefully they’ll have the sense to not touch it further.

1) You overestimate a founder’s salary by 20-30x - 100 dollars is more than a day’s net salary.

2) The problem, again, is the false claim during downgrade.

3) self hosting a couple of icons is a matter of 15-30min - make a request to the kit, store assets, commit, push, deploy demo, test, deploy prod, done. But not if the kit is not accessible anymore - even though advertised as such.

4) I agree it has been a mistake to ever rely on a 3rd party to host icons. From todays POV, it’s ridiculous I’ve ever made that lazy decision.

You overestimate a founder’s salary by 20-30x - 100 dollars is more than a day’s net salary.

When I’m bootstrapping, I tend to value my time at my normal consulting rate, since that’s what we’re ultimately comparing to. If I wasn’t putting this hour into the client on a work day, I’d be billing it to a client, so that’s the opportunity cost in my head.

But yeah, that certainly changes the math a bit. My reply above was in the more normal context of a salaried engineer deciding to save the company £10/month by spending £15,000 in billable hours building an alternative.

Sorry about this. The amount of engineering required is pretty high for making downgrade work, and we’re a small team. With limited time for new work, we end up prioritizing new features over making downgrade easy. (I’ll be honest, it’s always bothered us that downgrade isn’t self-serve.)

I’ll chat with the team and see if we can prioritize a long term solution (we just recently had new ideas for how to do this more simply). In the meantime, we might be able to figure something out for you. Feel free to hit me up directly if you need.

As I said below in a different comment: just remove the false claims from the free plan and we’re all good. Nobody expects you to deliver value for free which you don’t want to or cannot deliver.

I just looked over the plans page, and I didn’t see anything. Can you screenshot the false claims for me? Would love to get that fixed up.

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