Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Why is a SaaS locking out a fairly high-profile customer like this, and publicly airing B2B accounts-receivable drama, to the customer's community?

How big can the bill be, for something you could run on a 20 year-old PC?

Given the strange coincidence with the social media outrage over TOU fiasco, I don't know who to be scratching my puzzled head at here.

View on HN

It's a pretty good way to get the bill paid to be honest

I also run a B2B SaaS and I have found that over time the customers who I think are going to be terrible for paying, typically tend to be very good at paying and the customers who I think are going to be very good for paying (in that they have good standing in the community in things like that) tend to be pretty bad at paying on time (and with NET30 and all)

Ultimately I don't really understand why I shouldn't be paid on time (I've got to live too, and I have suppliers likewise) so I think this is pretty fair game, I sold you a product under the promise that you would pay in 30 days, if you're incapable of doing that (ignoring exceptional reasons) I don't necessarily want to go and lend you extra credit just because you're Mozilla

Having a terrible accounts receivable department isn't a exceptional reason.

Because if you don’t, they might go somewhere else.

Losing a non-paying customer does not sound like a bad thing.

If it's the first time in 10 years and they're in your upper tier, then perhaps it is.

I'm totally with you on wanting to get paid in a timely manner. (I used to do NET 10 for consulting invoices.)

But you'd do a courtesy call before cutting off a B2B customer? Even just to make sure they got the bill, and that a payment they made hadn't mistakenly not been credited. Which would be an opportunity for an immediate funds transfer or CC charge, if necessary to keep the site up. (Also an opportunity for them to say, "Actually, if you could just make it read-only until the news cycle is over..." :)

They will tell you it must have slipped though the cracks, and that they'll get right on it, but no payment will materialize.

That doesn’t mean you get to skip that step though

It's the age of automation. They likely got more than one courtesy automated reminder e-mails. If one doesn't respect automated reminders, one will respect automatic service cut-out.

Exactly. Which is why I said "Which would be an opportunity for an immediate funds transfer or CC charge, if necessary to keep the site up."

I'll work collegially with customers/partners who I think are being honest, or who can be nudged towards that from a somewhat different industry convention. But I wouldn't take "the check's in the mail" from someone who I thought was being dishonest. And an immediate payment would be appropriate for even honest people to do, in light of neglecting to mail a check in time.

We've been overdue on something like this, but a public notice would have left us moving to a competitor.

It's easy for it to happen if a colleague is away for a month, or has left, and the bill isn't being seen by anyone. Do you read (do you even receive?) out-of-office replies to your invoices?

Of course it shouldn't be on an individual's email, but with annual billing it's easy to overlook.

IMO if I lose someone's business because they can't pay the bill... Good? Right?

Is this a case of can’t pay? It sounds more like a error. So you would loose out on future revenue.

You'd lose out on headaches from your customer not paying and having to waste resources following up on it.

If they can pay, then just pay for the service they got.

Seems pretty straightforward.

Yeah, but you also lose all the income from that customer to save a few bucks for sending an extra invoice…? The customers who pay a little late have never been a noticeable cost for us.

The ones that contact support for every little thing or those that have a million strange feature requests on the other hand.

> lose all the income from that customer to save a few bucks for sending an extra invoice…?

Maybe they sent all the extra invoices? It sounds like you are assuming discontinuing the service was the first and only thing they tried.

Once they figure it out, they can come back as a paying customer. :)

It's not the provider's responsibility to help their customer get their sh#t together.

This is a fine attitude to have if your problem is that you have too many customers.

The opposite is not a fine attitude to have especially if you have too few customers. Once they know that they can ignore payments by using that kind of excuse, something very bad will happen to your subscription revenue.

You typically get multiple reminders. If that's "an error", then that's an error that will happen again and again and again.

That's a problematic customer you don't want unless you're otherwise broke or want to keep them for other reasons (e.g. publicity).

Multiple reminders to the same person isn't much use if he's in hospital, and you're ignoring the out-of-office replies.

The time this happened to us, I was pleased the company looked at our website and phoned the receptionist. We paid the bill within an hour, and moved the responsibility to the finance and IT teams.

Maybe there are too many customers who just ignore bills for services they no longer want to use, I don't know, but given these companies usually have a sales team it would seem worth the time to make a call or write a personal email to an existing customer to maintain their custom.

I know of a company that missed its yearly Microsoft Exchange Online payment. After four month Microsoft cut of their email. Which one could argue is also a "public notice" because emails bounced. (That did the trick and the company paid immediately.)

You are telling me:

1. Microsoft should have tried to find a different way to contact and reach out.

2. That you would have moved your eMail/Groupware to someone else because of that.

To each their own.

A sales person from Microsoft emails us every 3-6 months or so trying to upsell us on a more expensive 365 subscription.

I think their time would be well spent contacting a customer who hasn't paid.

Blocking sending email would also be a more reasonable step before blocking receiving email.

And yes, I'd consider moving.

Or if your marginal cost is small (eg, if your primary product is software) so a slow or delinquent payer doesn't actually cost you anything.

At least where I live & work, I have to pay taxes the when I invoice, not when I receive payment, so they cost me 20% of the billed amount, at least temporarily.

> It sounds more like a error

It seems like Mozilla has made quite a lot of errors in the past few years.

Bad e-mail management is not a responsibility on my part, and a disorganized client moving to another company is not really a threat either.

You’re making assumptions with details we don’t have. For all we know Mozilla is eight months behind on payment and this happens regularly.

In your scenario, the hosting company’s reaction seems extreme. In mine, it seems mild. The truth is we just don’t know and should refrain from bold defences until more details are in.

> It's easy for it to happen if a colleague is away for a month, or has left, and the bill isn't being seen by anyone.

Why TF would important things like that go to a single person's individual mailbox?

Take a couple hours to set up a canned ticketing / helpdesk thing or something, and have bills and other vendor alerts go to that email alias.

Because the companies make it easy to sign up with an individual's address, and that's often fine to test out the service.

Some then make it difficult to use a more appropriate address.

It's not ideal, but there's a huge amount of IT that doesn't follow the official policies — like all the teams using AWS rather than going through their official procurement procedure.

Suspending a service is one thing. Advertising that it’s due to non paid bills is inexcusable.

Also consider how many bridges you would burn if it’s in error. Or it’s a disputed payment.

This is probably how people who never pay their debts think.

"It's ok if I am late with the bill, they will feel bad for me and never risk me reputation damage by airing out my debts".

But in the absence of a sense of responsibility or obligation, shame might be the only thing that might work to make them fulfill their obligations.

If the bills are indeed not paid and the reason I don't see why it's "inexcusable". As long as you're not claiming they can't pay them or haven't paid them out of malice without proof you're just being truthful.

Keeping quiet when it's something simple is more weird to me. God forbid someone assumes massive corpo X is going bankrupt because of a web hosting bill..

No giving notice is public service against fraudulent organization. It indicates clearly that only proper way to operate with such organization is payment before service is provided.

Paying your bills should be first priority. No excuse, no crying. If you fail, fully own to it and terminate the chain of command involved.

Some companies love to blame vendors for their own non-payment. The blameshift works when users only have the company's (the actual customer's) word for it.

Having basic transparency like "this service is in read-only due to nonpayment" really helps internal users to realize the company is being a bad customer. Which then pushes the company's reps to actually pay for the service.

So, no it's not inexcusable.

Leaving your vendors hanging is literally taught and practiced among certain circles of entrepreneurs. Though not spelled out in explicit terms, they operate on the basis of "Fuck you, I got mine." They want a perpetual jackpot machine, and will stomp on anyone to get what they want, more money in the pursuit of even more money. They don't operate on the old mantra of "the boss is the last to get paid."

You'll be able to find them a few years down the road complaining that the mean old IRS is being so unfair because of the little bit of tax evasion that's totally not as bad as those real scammers on welfare.

I couldn’t believe this either until I saw it with my own eyes.

The entitlement is strong with some people. It is "a" force. But more tied to mediocrity than midiclorians. . .

I learned that lesson at the first place I worked. It was an accountant's office and the partner in charge of paying invoices would literally go through the outstanding ones and see which he thought he could get away without paying, even if they were overdue.

So even companies you might think will pay promptly, don't always do so.

+1 to this.

My employer can be really bad at paying NET30, especially on fluctuating "pay for what you use" bills due to all the bureaucracy. Since it's not a fixed amount it can't be rubber stamped by anyone... And dear lord help you if you issue an invoice followed by credits separately...

We always pay the bill, but the purchasing employee has to review it (they're the only ones that can evaluate the claimed usage), then the department head has to approve it, then department finance processes it.. the division finance has to then rubber stamp it... Then the controller had to release the funds.

I see notices all the time where we're ~3-5 days late (often times the money has already been sent, but hasn't hit the sellers account yet)

Totally agree but at least I don't know more about how long this has been developing for and what attempts have been made at curing it - if this is indeed the intention... There's a thread here suggesting the idea that it's a stunt to get extort more money from donors. While I wouldn't go quite as far, I think it's undeniable that there's a rift between long time users of Mozilla products and their current strategies (or at least their tactics if they don't have a strategy). I still believe Firefox is the best browser out there, mainly because they've resisted the temptation to take ad blocking APIs away but having to disable all suggested xyz, save to cloud, experiments, user metrics, ... Just takes a while and leaves you with little trust.

Exactly.

I feel a good desire to fork the browser (ff or one of its forks) to be able build it for myself with a set of debloat patches. Just to avoid worrying about tracking and the "sell your data" stuff.

Well you don't know how long it has been unpaid for and I think it's good that it's transparent so that at least there is no confusion about why it's in read-only mode

The only thing Discourse said was "This site is in read-only mode because there are overdue hosting payments". It's a system message that's automatically shown when the customer forgets to pay their bills.

The drama comes from Mozilla's nonpayment, not Discourse's policy. Weird to try to pin the blame on Discourse.

> How big can the bill be, for something you could run on a 20 year-old PC?

Easily 7 figures, possibly 8 figures. Enterprise sales are a weird realm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com