Backblaze backups about to go poof for EU/Indian customers
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This Feb, my payment (auto debit via CC) failed, and upon logging in could not figure out any other way to pay.
I soon received an interesting email from them ( https://i.imgur.com/p19SaFX.png ) which said they do not support Reserve Bank of India (RBI) 's e-mandate policy and advised me to use a card which does not include e-mandate. European customers have a similar issue due to 3D Secure.
I as an Indian citizen only have RBI authorized credit cards, which have been on e-mandate since late 2021. I have faced a similar issue with card auto debit on other websites as well due to this policy, however they all support alternate payment methods.
Backblaze does not, and has provided no alternative since this cropped up 2 months ago. Customer support has no solution as well. I just received an email that failing further payment, my account will go poof next month.
How a company running a critical service such as backups can screw up so badly regarding a fundamental business requirement such as billing is beyond me. They will simply cease operating for almost all European / Indian customers in a little over a month's time.
Even if they manage to dig themselves this, not sure one can trust them enough to continue being a "going concern".
> Maybe this will help: Backblaze started using Stripe a long time ago (gosh, maybe 10 years ago?) and used a very specific set of original Stripe APIs. When some banking laws in some countries (specifically India at the time) changed a couple years ago, Backblaze looked into enabling 3D secure and SEPA and found out Backblaze was using the "1.0" version of the APIs that DID NOT support 3D secure and SEPA, and that to use 3D secure and some other features like SEPA then Backblaze had to "port" all of the Backblaze billing code to use the new "2.0" version of the APIs. So that project was kicked off, a programmer on the Backblaze billing team began working on that. But it probably should be finished by now. Or close.
https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/17rq10o/backblaz...
That seems plausible given how archaic their administration system looks like.