Hacker News Reader

Comment by altin0 | Hacker News Reader

Lol this deescalated pretty quickly, went from $104K to $20K to $5K to $0 Which basically means you almost scammed the customer for $5K or $20K. Super negative practices. I for one could never trust a company operating in that manner. It would be much more honest to say "unlimited bandwidth" and set a hard-limit for maximum budget, then people know they won't be charged, than to go through all this crap and then pretend you're doing a favor to the customer (you're not). If I'm normally spending $10/month any idiot out there would know for sure that I'm not going to spend $104K instantly. That's a very basic filter to have. But you don't place such filters because obviously you're working on the principle to scam people many thousands of $ if they fall for that. Heck, for all we know you might send that amount of traffic to your customer and the try to scam them and if it doesn't work then pretend you're doing them a favor.

View on HN

The fact that the CEO had to step in after this blew up online otherwise they were going to try to extort that poor dude for thousands of dollars!

Moving my sites off of netlify ASAP.

Tell you what is a good question, why is this thread on page FIVE of HN (ranked #125) with 1000+ upvotes, 400+ comments and only 7 hours old?

This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. See "How are stories ranked?" and "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?"

About this specific case: it set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector) and also got moderation downweights. We sometimes turn off that penalty, but I don't think we'd do so in a case like this, because HN gets so many posts of this nature. They flare up with Big Drama that is sensational for a while but not particularly interesting, and therefore not really what the site is for.

In fact HN gets so many posts of this type that it has become a joke, and not only that but a cliché, so much so that the top comment of the Reddit thread repeats it [1]. That's about as repetitive as anything gets. The basic idea of HN is to gratify intellectual curiosity [2] and avoid repetition [3].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1b14bty/netlify_jus...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

I don't really buy that to be honest.

I read this whole thread before the CEO posted and after, and neither time thought any of the comments were out of line or even that the general mood was any more heated than any other random HN thread. People are politely asking pertinent questions.

And I think once the CEO makes a statement which contradicts the company's support response, that becomes very interesting. Particularly to anybody that uses their service. I'm certainly not finding the conversation very repetetive or cliche.

You're welcome to disagree, of course. My main concern is to explain what the principles are. I'm not saying we apply them perfectly—sometimes we make bad calls.

I can tell you pretty much for certain though, that we'd hear many more complaints if a Reddit thread about a customer support shitstorm stayed on HN's front page for very long.

Btw, the Customer Support Fuckup category is one of several $X where HN has become known as the place for $X, but only because HN is not actually for $X. Another example is the Site Is Down category—people often come to HN to find out what's going on when some $Site or other is having an outage. But just as HN itself isn't a site monitoring platform, it's also not a customer-support-of-last-resort platform.

If the community feels like this customer support fuckup is altogether more interesting, I'd consider reversing the call, but again, my gut feeling is that we'd get even more complaints that way.

I agree completely with the underlying principles, I just think once the CEO has commented and stirred up some interesting discussion that's relevant to a large segment of your userbase, the thread doesn't really belong to some generic "customer service shitstorms" category anymore.

I learnt more about Netlify, Vercel etc and how they operate from this thread from the last 100 "customer service" threads combined. I learned about Cloudflare's offerings, and a bit about Hetzner. And it was all very interesting.

You said you sometimes turn off those penalties, I think this thread would be a good candidate.

Ok, let's try that and see what happens!

Thanks dang. This was one of the most important posts on HN for me since inception, and prompted my own immediate migration away from Netlify hosting[1]. I would hazard a guess that there are many Netlify users on HN, and becoming aware of the unlimited billing exposure (as well as Netlify's official policy (such as it is)) makes for important reading.

[1] https://tinyapps.org/blog/202402260700_netlify-to-cloudflare...

"Is that you, Rabbit?" said Pooh.

"Let's pretend it isn't," said Rabbit, "and let's see what happens."

Thanks for explaining.

Something that makes me feel uneasy about the fact that the post gets hidden is that this strongly benefits Netlify. It seemed like lots of people moved off Netlify after reading the post.

I'm not suggesting that HN actively took an action in Netlify's favor, but the potential is there. Is the algorithm for flame war detection open source? Or do we essentially need to trust you that there was no interference from Netlify? (I do trust you but others might not).

We didn't have any private contact with anyone about this post other than a couple users emailing to ask why it wasn't on the front page anymore. Nor were we thinking about who would or wouldn't benefit—that never crossed my mind. I was just thinking about standard HN moderation practice.

I don't know how to get every user to trust us. All we can do is answer questions when asked. That seems to be enough to satisfy most of the community most of the time, and it's probably not possible to do a lot better than that, much as I would like to.

I'm not a fan of opaque ranking algorithms either. Just use this, the only thing it has is a 500 point threshhold and surprise, that works perfectly fine to determine what is currently trending in the community

https://hn.moritz.pm

I asked this question as "Ask HN" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39524660

I found out about this from twitter - weird how it's so buried on HN.

Heck, at that point, why not "send some traffic" to your customer? It's not like they have any way of verifying its source. Hmm... why even send traffic at all? Just add a multiplier to their metrics!

This is very weird take. I'm struggling to understand why this is incident as a reflection of "super negative practices" or is somehow a "scam". The CEO came here and publicly apologized for the mistake and mis-communication, and the issue is resolved for the user with no charges. What am I missing?

What price would the dude have to pay if he didn't publish it? How often does this happen and why is there no protection against charging free customers 100k out of the blue. Why charge it and shock the customer if practice is to waive it? The CEOs response kinda just made the situation worse.

Yeah, I don't buy this conspiracy theory. The reason why they charge it could be as simple as they calculated the bandwidth usage following a ddos attack. It amounted to 104k worth of bandwidth usage. There system is not sophisticated enough to recognize it was a mistake due to attack on their site. Thus a manual intervention was needed, and now it's resolved.

Right, but there's still a huge contradiction here. The support email says it's standard practice to charge 20%. Now the CEO's comment says it's standard practice to waive it entirely. So which one is true?

It's only a weird take if you don't have any common sense. It's super simple: either offer unlimited bandwidth(since you're not charging these anyways), like Cloudflare Pages does, or put in place controls that will allow customer to set a top limit for their budget. You can't just all of a sudden send them a $104K bill and expect them to pay when the've never spent more than a few bucks. And then even worse, you can't pretend to expect them to pay 20%, then 5% then pretend you're doing them a favor by completely liftig it off. That's just arbitrary billing and preying for any victim that would fall and agree to pay 20% or 5% etc. I'm just asking for common sense and practices that build trust, not arbitraty billing rules.

"Pay for what you use" is an arbitrary billing rule? Come on now.

OP was ignorant, and got tossed a lifeline. Also “just make everything zero dollars bro” is a ridiculous proposition.

In New Jersey I have to let an attendant pump my gas. If I have a heart attack while he’s pumping gas, but I never explicitly say “please stop once it’s full” and he, innocently enough, takes the still-flowing gas hose and pops it into a sewer grate once my tank is full, you’d be hard-pressed to find a reasonable person agree that the attendant was throwing me a lifeline when he refunds me after I come back complaining about my $2k gas receipt.

This is a dumb analogy, but the point is there is very obviously a pattern in this payment process that is ripe for abuse. The question of whether or not you aim to be an abusive business, plucking every shady profit where you can put the onus on the customer to try to come get their money back is one that many companies are deciding, and many are erring in the direction of the dark pattern.

By not working to avoid this problem from the get go, there is an implication about how a company wants to make their profits.

Pay for what I use works for airline seats and reserved compute/storage resources.

I have no control over how much traffic my public sites get. There is zero value in me signing up for a service which charges me based on traffic if I can’t control the maximum they’ll charge me. Would you sign up for an infinite bill?

the CEO said they're "forgiving any bills from legitimate mistakes" which effectively means "just make everything zero dollars bro". And no, he didn't use all that bandwidth, he was victim of a DDoS which the hosting provider should have measures in place to prevent or limit the service if it happens.

Perhaps a bit ignorant, but to be fair that Netlify attempted to charge him is absolutely ridiculous. With my hosting provider, I would pay a whopping 50 EUR for the same bandwidth that he was asked to pay 104.5K USD for. That just shouldn't be possible to happen, especially on a free tier.

Any person seeing a user that normally has a $0/$10 per month bill suddenly spike to $104K would see that this is obviously a DDoS.

If it has always been a "policy" to forgive bills, shouldn't it have been 100% forgiven immediately after OP contacted support in the first place? Why go through the trouble of playing the hero by offering "discounts".

The user was asked to pay 20% then 5k on a service that's called "free" but has some extras which actually cost money.

After this the CEO comes along and says that the policy is actually not to bill for this kind of event... But the company actually tried to bill this user 3 times... soo it all stinks really.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com