Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rekindle8090 | Hacker News Reader

"We can either charge per tile, per job or on demand. Or you can have us on call for a year and get any of the former at a discounted rate." "Per tile. Lay tiles until I say stop" >you fall asleep "Wtf why are you still laying tile" "You said per tile and lay until you say stop. That'll be 50k please"

How is this the contractors fault?

View on HN

"Can you lay tiles until I say stop, or until it's about $250 worth, whichever comes first"

"No, as one of the top tile layers in the country I can't do that, for your own protection. What if fifty elephants came and wanted to use your bathroom all at once? You'd feel pretty dumb having to reject them instead of me simply automatically adding $1 million to your bill"

But in this example, the last line of your story is the customer going “yeah, sounds good, let’s do it and hope that doesn’t happen” and signing the agreement.

The cloud services wrote the contract and the UI for their console. They then encourage young developers to try out their tools and encourage a market environment where those skills are needed to secure employment. Some kid goes and tries to build their first web app, they follow instructions and tutorials but miss that a single default selection on a menu three nested layers down is going to cost $2,000 per month. This isn’t disclosed on the page. Sure, it can be determined by reading several different documents, but the provider chose to not show estimates for costs in the setup.

How is that the kid’s fault?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com