We had negotiated a contract with a fixed capacity and overage charges for when we went over them. They estimated our usage for six months out and twelve months out, then spread the fixed cost out across two six month periods, billing monthly. So in effect, we would be paying for capacity six months in advance that we didn’t need, progressively getting closer to accurate billing.
The real problem came about ten months into the contract. We went over the fixed capacity. Still, no problem, right? That’s what the overage charges are for. Nope! They just switched our service off, causing us downtime.
They fixed it by manually applying a random amount of credit. Which we weren’t billed for. After that, they were really keen to negotiate a new fixed contract, even though they weren’t billing us for the overage charges.
We couldn’t figure it out at first because they were behaving very strangely about a bunch of things. Eventually we realised that there was one thing that explained all their weird behaviour: they just hadn’t implemented overage handling at all. They had no way of stopping our service from being automatically disabled when we went over our limit; the only way they could fix it was to manually apply credit; and the only way they had to bill us for the overages was to negotiate a new contract.
I’m still not certain if that was the case, but it was the only explanation we could come up with, and they were less than forthcoming about it all. The whole service was an absolute shitshow in many other ways as well; it was beta quality at best and they had no interest in fixing the issues. So can I believe they just didn’t implement overages? Yup.