Hacker News Reader

I see that your website asks $9 + $10/month for the basics package.

I've never once had the need to write a demand letter, so if I ever need to, I'd expect to be a one time thing. I definitely won't need a monthly service.

How does that work in this case? Does it mean I'd pay $19 and then cancel the monthly service?

Agreed with this. IMO, it should charge a one time fee to handle it all, and probably more than $19. I can't see many people suing folks monthly. Charge me $40 or $50 and take care of everything for me!

There is a one time option (click one-time at top) and it is $35!

Neat. I'm definitely bookmarking this.

I personally think you could charge more if needed. Dealing with legalese and paperwork is a huge, huge headache to most people. Nicely done.

They rely on you forgetting to cancel. Then when you notice a few months later, you demand a refund. They won’t give it to you, necessitating that you resubscribe in order to send them a demand letter. #growthhacking

If they don't refund, take them to small claims court

You joke but we'd write you a letter for that.

Would you still formally ship it or just walk over to the incoming mail box?

Not really. We have Stripe send a recharge reminder 7 days before it happens next month with an option to unsubscribe through Stripe subscription portal in 2ish clicks. No cancellation reason asked.

I've done plenty of growth hacking before, and our subscription flow is not trying to do that.

Both parties have adverse selection issues.

First: customers looking for their service are likely to be noisy and costly if the business screws them. The business is selecting for fractious customers so the business needs to be careful.

Secondly: the business is a specialist in the art of dealing with small claims. If a customer needs to make a small claim against the business, the business understands the system in depth, and can defend itself better than most. Although I would also expect the business understands the financial costs better, and perhaps are more refund friendly than other businesses might be.

There is a one time option (just click the tab at top of screen that says one time).

Alternatively, you can cancel immediately if you'd like. It's standard stripe portal with 2 clicks or so. You will get a renewal reminder 7 days before it charges next month.

People who subscribe tend to find a lot of little annoyances with companies/refunds/travel stuff (airlines are a big one) that more than pays for the subscription. But feel free to use as is best for you.

You say airlines are a big part of your business model. Do you only work with US airlines or do you support letters for EU261 rules as well? I'm a very frequent flyer and never had many issues with getting compensation from domestic airlines but European airlines are an entirely different story. I've found the best experience has been paid services that take a huge cut like Airhelp, so it would be nice to not pay 35% every time I have an issue.

AirHelp [1] has built a business around EU261 claims.

[1] https://www.airhelp.com/en/

Yep, I mentioned them in my comment. Though they are effective, they take a huge chunk of change.

I'd consider filing something against Frontier for a gate employe giving me wrong information (I have it documented) resulting monetary loss. But then I was afraid they'd blacklist me from flying. As much as I don't want to fly them, they have a lot of flights out of my city.

Have you heard of airlines doing that?

FWIW I did contact their CS & social media and basically got told "too bad you got some wrong info..."

IANAL, but:

>they are now obligated to show up to court or otherwise risk a default judgement against them that cannot be reversed later.

Is definitely untrue. You can appeal a default judgement and win. Ask me how I know.

(Edit: attempt to fix formatting)

Does that apply to small-claims court?

IANAL—yes. Appellate process looks into whether or not the judge followed the law when making the ruling/judgement.

Smalls Claims Court is still a court, and the rulings are still subject to the laws of the land.

From a practical matter, you will spend more in legal fees appealing than what is in the judgement.

How do you know?

(I genuinely want to hear this story)

Late reply, sorry.

My company got a default judgement in small claims court ($3k) that I only learned about months after it happened because the state of California had a totally wrong address (mixed up with some other company) in their database. So I was served at some random address that was fortunately only 50 miles from me; “fortunate” because I still had to appear at that county’s courthouse to make any appeal.

The fact that The California State Corporations Board had the wrong address had no bearing on my appeal - that was “my fault” for not monitoring it and having it corrected.

So I filed for an actual appeal, appeared before the judge with the plaintiff (and a lawyer on my side that cost $2500), and won the appeal on the merits of the case. Had I not won, the state would have issued a bill and denied the business renewal unless paid.

It was an utterly bogus claim by a plaintiff that admitted he made a hobby of small claims court. Most of his cases he won because he defendants never showed up; as I didn’t originally because of the wrong service address.

Two lessons: check the state records for your business religiously (because it’s your fault if they get it wrong, no matter what), and fight the claim no matter what or you’ll become a target for future small-claims rewards because the judgements are public information.

OP explicitly said in their post that they've already sent a physical demand letter:

> I wrote a letter twice, and sent in the mail via postage, with tracking, which was delivered, to cancel my Ad services and provide a refund. No response however.

They sent "a letter" twice. Not necessarily a specific demand letter and not necessarily to legal. At this point details like that matter.

^ This. Physically mailing the letter makes a difference. (Been there, done that).

I keep this article in my bookmarks re: how to write a proper complaint letter. It talks specifically about credit reporting agencies, but a lot of what he says can be applied anywhere else: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...

I achieved my quickest, simplest, most pleasant customer service interaction yet with an airline by writing a letter explaining what they did (with transaction IDs, confirmation numbers, etc), and what they should have done. The situation was not entirely simple, and I was not looking forward to explaining it verbally to a rep.

They sent me back a simple letter a couple weeks later saying they'd resolved the issue the way I requested and provided me the updated documentation.

I'll definitely consider this approach next time something like this happens.

Sounds like you’d do very well as a QA professional

The last sentences read like the opening header on a landing page.

That’s a cool business.

How well does this work for medical bills?

I have $4000+ in collections because insurance didn't pay for what they were supposed to, and the hospital decided to send it to collections. Should I send the demand letter to the collector, hospital, or insurance?

You should contact your state's insurance regulator. They're very powerful and generally get proper reactions from insurance companies.

20+ years ago, I was in a situation that, at this high level anyway, was similar to what you're describing. The collections agency had also put a black mark on my credit history. I don't recall the details, but to whatever extent I did contact the medical provider or the insurance company, they claimed to be unable to help me. (I no longer owed them money, afterall.) The amount I supposedly owed was some hundreds of dollars, not thousands.

After repeatedly failing to have any success communicating with the collections agency, I sent a letter to the Better Business Bureau about the situation. The collector stopped contacting me and my credit history was restored. I never spoke with a lawyer about it and don't know if my approach to addressing the problem was typical.

From my experience, I would suggest that you take the fight to the collector. They are the ones to whom you currently supposedly owe money. (I did not attempt to sue anyone, though, and maybe that detail, or others, would change the answer for your specific situation.)

> The collections agency had also put a black mark on my credit history.

This doesn't seem to be true. According to Experian, the original _creditor_ is the one that puts the black mark on your credit history when they sell your debt to a collections agency. (Typically for pennies on the dollar.)

> After repeatedly failing to have any success communicating with the collections agency, I sent a letter to the Better Business Bureau about the situation. The collector stopped contacting me and my credit history was restored. I never spoke with a lawyer about it and don't know if my approach to addressing the problem was typical.

At a guess, the collections agency might have decided it wasn't worth fighting you over it for a few hundred dollars and dropped your case to spend more time on larger targets. But I don't see how they (or the BBB) could have fixed your credit report, they don't have the power to do that.

> I would suggest that you take the fight to the collector.

I mean, you can try but you are unlikely to succeed. These people are (usually) skilled negotiators, they can't easily be outfoxed or convinced to be on your side. Their only goal is to get money from you. The dirty secret that the collections agencies don't want people to know is that nobody has any actual obligation to pay them. They buy bad debt and hope they can convince you to pay them. The ONLY leverage they have is the ability to guilt and intimidate. Some agencies engage in shady behavior (calling friends and neighbors, making threats). These behaviors are generally illegal, but the kind of people who fall that far into debt are generally not the kind of people who can afford to take legal action against a lawyered-up agency.

You never HAVE to pay a collections agency, and even if you do, the debt NEVER gets paid back to the original creditor, just the agency collecting it. Neither will paying them fix your credit report in any way.

If you have debt that was legitimately defaulted on and made its way all the way to a collections agency, the very best thing to do is not engage them. They will give up eventually. They _might_ try to help if the debt wound up in collections due to a creditor's mistake, but I wouldn't bet too much on it.

> > The collections agency had also put a black mark on my credit history.

> This doesn't seem to be true.

Maybe the situation has changed over the past couple decades. (I don't recall which of the three credit reporting agencies this was with.) It was true for me back then. :)

In my case, the collector didn't initiate contact. I learned of the situation because I checked my credit report and then it was I who contacted them. I didn't know who they were or why they thought I owed them money. They tried to convince me to pay them, saying they'd remove the mark from my credit report after I did so.

I had believed the medical service (a couple years in the past at that time) had been completely covered by insurance and didn't know that anyone thought money was owed. I don't know where the original miscommunication/mistake had occurred. I only know that the collector dinged my credit report and that I had documentation showing that my insurance had addressed the original claim (paying the medical provider), which enabled me to challenge the collection agency's assertion.

(Thank you for the additional information and context you've added about collection agencies. I knew little about them outside of my direct experience with this one.)

There is a book I recently purchased called "Never Pay The First Bill". It covers this exact kind of scenario and tells you what to do step by step, all the way up to small claims court, though you usually don't need to go that far. Highly recommended.

More than likely you're going to need to get an itemized bill from the hospital listing the actual icd-10 charge codes and amounts for each service. Then you will need to cross reference this with your insurance's Explanation of Benefits document, which shows what the insurer paid for each code and the remaining that you owe. If there are any codes missing, there has been a miscommunication between the hospital and insurance, and the insurance was not billed for something. It is also possible there will be errors in the codes themselves, charging you for things you did not receive or received less than they said (charge code for 1 hr complex appointment when your appointment was 10 minutes). In this case, you will need to request your medical records, and cross reference them with the charge codes to dispute the wrong codes.

It also tells you how to deal with collection agencies.

I have not run into the problem of insurance denying charges for things they are supposed to cover, but I have tried (years ago) to cross-reference my medical bills with my EoBs and gave up as nothing ever really matched up.

It is supposed to. It is supposed to be the exact same codes. If that is not the case then you were mis-billed, which according to that book is a common occurance.

You need to request the HCFA (maybe this has finally gone away after ~10 years) or CMS-1500 claim form for outpatient (like a clinic or same-day surgery or medical imaging) or UB-04 claim form for inpatient (hospital/skilled nursing stay) service.

The actual claims are generated and sent electronically as 837 or 837P formatted garbage (just look up the standard) by all but the tiniest providers but virtually any billing software can generate the equivalent "paper" form.

EoB quality depends on your insurance carrier; if they don't provide a breakdown with the original charge codes and diagnosis codes and a coverage decision then complain and request a more detailed explanation.

The most confusing part is the adjustments; every year the insurance companies and service providers in the U.S. waste a horrific amount of time and effort negotiating adjustment (discount) rates per insurance carrier (insurance always pays less than face value) and charge code. The provider picks prices that give them an overall net positive revenue given the set of adjustments from their (predicted) patient population and corresponding insurance carrier spread, so none of the prices or adjustments actually make any marketplace sense.

If you end up having to fully pay a bill that insurance won't cover, try to offer the provider ~50% and they'll be pretty happy to write off the difference since they wouldn't get much more from insurance. There are also often payment plans and other assistance available if you ask the billers.

I mean, I'll get a bill from my doctor (actually his group practice or whatever) it will list services that I recognize, show what the insurance paid, and what I owe (if anything). It usually looks about right and I have just not ever found that the time needed to audit that against the EoB statements has ever been worth it. The times I tried I got a headache and gave up but like I said it was years ago, well before ACA or any possible reforms that might have been made in the area of transparency in health care/insurance billing reports.

Healthcare is more complicated and it might be worth talking to an attorney (pay for an hour of time) to get advice on which party to pursue and how. This is unfortunately the biggest challenge with our service... how can we help people when it gets more complex.

Just a note that you should add https:// to your links so we can click on them!

Are there equivalent services in the EU and the UK?

You honestly don't need one in the UK, filing small claims via the governments site is very easy. They'll auto send a demand letter for you etc. https://www.gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money