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Comment by trcf22 | Hacker News Reader

After a quick check on Vercel stories, it seems all payments were discarded or mistakes in the first place.

Does it really happen to really have to pay such a bill? Do you need to tweet about it to be reimbursed?

> Do you need to tweet about it to be reimbursed?

This is what scares me, is social media the only way to get things sorted out nowadays? What if I don't have a large following nor an account in the first place, do I have to stomach the bill?

I can't imagine them sending it to collections. What kind of recourse would a company like Vercel have if you don't pay it?

They can sue you for the bill plus the legal costs.

This is exactly what happened to me during Covid... I had a flight that got cancelled at the beginning of the pandemic since the country closed the orders (essentially). A year after, still on lock downs and et al, I wanted to enquire about a refund, for months I got not answer, until I caught wind that people using Twitter were actually getting results. Now, I don’t use social media at all, so I had to create a Twitter account, twit about my case et voila! 30 mins after I got a response and they send me a PM with a case number... Not even going to mention the airline, but it is infuriating...

Someone at a community group I'm in messed up playing with Azure through their free for non-profits offering^. We were out about 1.2k€. Not huge but huge for us.

Encouraged by comments on HN over the years I had them ask support to kindly to wave it. After repeating the request a few times they eventually reduced their bill to <100€ but refused to wave it entirely.

So even without shaming on social media, But it probably depends. It's worth at least asking.

^The deal changed about six months ago.

It's waive, not wave

Relying on the mercy of a support agent that may be having a bad day is a poor strategy

No, at least in enterprise consulting for these kind of hosting, usually there is a contact person on the support team that one can reach directly.

However these projects are measured in ways that make Oracle licenses rounding errors.

Which naturally creates market segmentation on who gets tier 1 treatment and everyone else.

Once you're in a contract + TAM territory, pricing works very differently. Also, temporary experiments and usage overruns become an interesting experience where the company may just forget to bill you a few thousands $ just because nobody looked at the setup recently. Very different situation to a retail user getting unexpected extra usage.

I mean if developer got charged with 100k, more often than not the bank would decline that first maybe if you didn't have that high credit limit

but what happen if this happen to corporate account and somewhere resource get leaked???

multi billions dollar company probably just shrug it off as opex and call it a day

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