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Comment by SkeuomorphicBee | Hacker News Reader

I hate the prevailing sentiment around here that if you are not paying then you deserve all harm to comes to you. If I get free food sample from a brand I fully expect that it should comply with the same sanitary/health standards as a paid product, food makers can't just shrug a harmful contamination/spoiling in free samples and then just go "they are not paying so not my problem". We must hold free tech services to the same high standards.

Not to this specific case, it is not as you imply a case of a single person having a problem and not having timely support, it is a widespread problem or policy somewhere (purposeful or accidental) that collectively harmed many free-tier users.

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I mean... I also expect the people handing out the free samples to be able to say "no more" to me. I'm not paying them, and they can stop being "nice" at any point without doing anything wrong.

I don't see how this is any different?

He wasn't harmed in the sense that netlify drove to his house and stabbed him. He lost access to a free food platter.

A possibly better analogy would be if a ride-share gave you a free ride to a concert and all of your friends have used that free ride without issue but then the ride-share company forced you out of the ride halfway to the concert without warning and said "should've read the fine print not our problem!" - now you're possibly in a bad neighborhood with a dead phone battery in a much worse place than you would've been if you never trusted the free service to begin with (and I would suggests it's not hard at all to imagine a scenario with more dire consequences in this situation)

If people are planning their near future based on what you've said you would likely be giving them, then at some point there is probably some inherited responsibility to at least give the user of that service a heads up so they can make other plans if possible.

The ride analogy is not a good one because you're in a different spot from where you started.

While with Netlify the person is back at exactly where they started before Netlify was hosting w/e their project was. So they're in the same neighborhood with the same battery level as they started with.

The free tier is very clearly not for professional work so its really more like if your buddy said they could pick you up but they won't move a couch for you and you showed up with a couch and they just left.

>While with Netlify the person is back at exactly where they started //

Hmm, moving to a free service can take a lot of time, there might be lock-in?

I don't have specific experience of netlify.

I stayed with my hosting provider despite them doubling my costs just because it would take a long time to find another trustable provider with the offering I need and then a lot of time to move and make sure everything is working.

If it's just a white label service then yes, easy to switch back. If it's not directly comparable then integration costs (in time) can mean you've been "dumped in the road half way there".

Of course if the driver tells you directly "I might have to drop you half way" then that's fine.

> Hmm, moving to a free service can take a lot of time, there might be lock-in?

Which is why it's good to pay for the product to get support once you're dependent on it. It's why cloud providers give companies and devs free credit. Once you've built it on that platform, you're less likely to want to move, and might need to scale, and get support once you're making money. This is how free tiers work, they're basically a demo, and they can cancel accounts for abuse or get around to fixing problems if and when they feel like it. You're also welcome to find another service...that's free, that provides great support and hope they stick around.

Going back to the free sample analogy, you can get one for free, but if you want the full product (including support), you gotta pay.

It takes a couple of minutes to setup services like these (be it netlify, vercel, Cloudflare, etc.) You connect your repo, tell it what command to run, and then which directory to grab. If you’re using a popular framework like Hugo they’ll often auto detect all of those settings for you.

They are not interchangeable though and that's the crux of it. When a service like this tells you you're eligible for using their product for free and then boot you off their service, they are potentially leaving you in a worse state than if you had never used their service to begin with.

It's hard to express how benign most of this is and I'm not trying to oversell the damages, but there is potential for it to be bad and thus at some point there's a responsibility to your users (that champion your product and give you indirect value) to do at least the bare minimum of giving them an email or something.

It certainly takes less time for netlify to send an email than it does for their users to change platforms.

Right, its called vendor lock in. It's why a lot of services offer a free tier, to reduce the upfront investment in the hopes you'll settle in and eventually pay. It's why students get free software licenses, etc. It's a valid way of doing business, and its not like the consumer isn't aware of the risks. If you want to support a business on a free demo, don't get mad when you get no SLA.

In either case, they fixed the problem, but the expectation of immediate support on a free account is silly.

If you didn't pay anything for it, you're not owed anything.

People who signup for free accounts generally provide personal data in exchange for services according to the ToS they agreed to while signing up. You are owed what is prescribed in the ToS and other agreements.

"pay" is inaccurate. "Consideration" is the word you are looking for. It's silly to think otherwise.

Oh thank god. These kids of mine were getting expensive.

You're owed the truth and protections under the law.

The law will probably disagree in some cases :)

> If people are planning their near future based on what you've said you would likely be giving them, then at some point there is probably some inherited responsibility to at least give the user of that service a heads up so they can make other plans if possible.

If you’re not paying for it you’re not owed anything. Someone was doing you a favour at their expense and then they stopped. If you want something you can rely on pay for it.

Say what you will about Netlify, they have never driven to my house and stabbed me.

I caught them on my porch through my doorbell camera looking menacing. Fortunately, the door was locked so they left.

Open the Noor!

More like if you walk away with your free sample, and suddenly someone walks up to you and yanks it from your hands.

Those are not people who need support. They were locked out with no warning and no explanation.

Not really. OPs analogy is closer. It’s more like you’ve been getting free samples and eating them, then they said “ok, no more” without prior warning. You wouldn’t expect them to have to give you a discontinue warning and a grace period for you to find another free sample provider

I definitely would, and I have received such warning from more professional providers. Even my local grocery store sends an email when canceling tasting and marketing events. I don't know why you think otherwise.

Netlify's own EULA states (https://www.netlify.com/pdf/self-serve-subscription-agreemen...):

> While we always make an effort to communicate clearly and well in advance if we decide a particular website project is not a good fit for our Free Usage Tier, we reserve the right to disable or remove any website project on Netlify’s Free Usage Tier without notice at our sole discretion

so every free user should very much expect "an effort to communicate clearly and well in advance". They were explicitly told they should.

See - I read that exact same message, and applying my "contract legalese" filter I come away with the utter opposite opinion.

"we reserve the right to disable or remove any website project on Netlify’s Free Usage Tier without notice at our sole discretion"

That's the promise. Full stop. Everything else is filler words to make that seem more palatable to people.

You are being misled because you are not reading the contract as "a list of things netlify MUST do". Making assumptions based on anything else is folly - you are trusting a commercial entity to be "nice" and that's a really, really bad thing to trust them to do.

No one is saying they broke the law, just that it's very unprofessional and should be taken as a sign of unreliability, in stark contrast to someone who provides free samples and then stops.

Not a fair comparison, one is a health risk to human beings, the other is a business nuisance.

not necessarily true...imagine you're a kid with tech skills and you've made the local news for making a free to use website that tracks public transport buses that over the course of a month or two disadvantaged people come to rely on...then that service goes away suddenly while some disadvantaged person is out doing something in extreme weather...now that disadvantaged person has to go wait for the bus in extreme weather for a substantially longer period of time which could easily make them sick which could easily be a life altering experience for them.

So the word shouldn't get out that their public image is false? They and the other players are part of a trend that discourages people from setting up their own VPSes, saying it's a pain in the ass. Well so is Netlify, Vercel, and fly.io only you're also learning skills you can't use when you decide to leave one of these vendors.

I got locked out of the Vercel dashboard for a couple weeks due to a bug. For a $20/user/month paid account, mind you. This support thread feels similar, though unlike what happened to me with Vercel, it appears to be deliberate on Netlify's part.

Cloudflare seems more reliable but https://www.politico.eu/article/sap-cloudflare-enable-russia...

That's not a fair comparison, it would be more like if they run out of samples you can't demand more, or if you've already had 10 you might have to expect them to say no, or if you don't like the toppings, you can't really ask for substitutions.

Got some news for you:

Free/Charity food is exempt from safe food policies in many jurisdictions.

That's why so many homeless avoid the local soup kitchens, as they consistently give them food poisoning.

If you are not paying you literally deserve nothing.

The consideration here is the exchange of personal information for services, as covered by the ToS. The belief that money is the only acceptable form of consideration is foolish and not realistic.

Just because you don't exchange money doesn't mean nothing of value is being exchanged. Netlify does owe people certain things for that exchange. "Nothing" is absolutely and factually false.

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