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Comment by rcleveng | Hacker News Reader

WoW. That's certainly a surprise to me. I'd never expect an invoice after not putting in a card.

I also believe this is totally just a case of "billing and metering is hard, and may actually be a larger engineering effort than your actual service".

I was just looking at them earlier today since our Github actions are slow AF, and while they sounds great, this tells me it'll cost me more time to make sure I babysit it than most other trials.

With most of these, they end, the service stops working, and you have a choice to make: (a) it was worth it sign up, (b) not worth it revert.

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Founder of Depot [0] here. Feel free to try us out. We have a real free trial that is time based that doesn’t do odd things like this. Also have usage limits that you can put in place to further clamp down on runaway surprises.

[0] https://depot.dev

Site looks great!

I did notice that on the `products/github-actions` page, the metrics for the zed-industries/zed repo are missing. It's showing a `NaNm NaNs` for both the With and Without Depot sections. Might be worth fixing it, as the current state reads as Depot providing no improvement for zed.

A certain number of businesses will just pay an invoice if it looks real and has a business justification. There are scams around this, but also vendors who may be taking advantage of this. If 30% of customers will just start paying the invoices, it's worth it to them to deal with the questions from the rest of them. At least until reputational damage starts.

A very simple example of a scam that's probably happened to you if you own a domain name: as the expiration date approaches you'll get "invoices" from companies for domain name renewal charges. If you read the fine print it will say "this is a solicition for business" but otherwise it looks just like an invoice. Some people will just pay them.

Many years ago I met a woman that ran a "business" that simply invoiced legitimate companies for printer supplies and toner every month. A surprising number of her invoices were paid without question.

That went on for a couple years. Then one day she left town basically in the middle of the night and we never heard from her again.

I’ve heard of these “toner scammers” since at least the 1990s and probably earlier. Apparently they’re still at it: https://www.eojohnson.com/blog/toner-scams

It isn't technically a scam to offer a limited trial and bill when you go over as long as the terms mention that.

After all B2B transactions are often invoice based.

Perhaps I'm playing advocate of the devil here:

But does the fact that you have preconceived expectations about 'try for free' necessarily mean that a business offering 'try for free' has to meet all those expectations?

Technically 'try for free' can mean anything, and I'm pretty sure that they have declared it somewhere (perhaps in the terms & conditions that people just agree to). Isn't it up to the business to do their due dilligence about the services they get from vendors?

Personally I think they've exploited the expectations everybody have about 'try for free', and they're morally wrong for that. But I'm pretty sure that morals never come into play when it comes to (US) business, so I wonder if we can really fault a company for doing whatever is legally allowed?

> I'd never expect an invoice after not putting in a card.

Startups have to innovate to stay alive and YC never discourages this kind of "innovation" if the startup has the potential to turn into big dollars.

Yep, the "Its not fraud/illegal if you make defense against cost more than just paying the cost".

It turns legitimate enterprises and businesses into quazi-illegal scam engines. Like, health clubs or Adobe scam-subscriptions.

OpenAI used to do billing like this too.

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