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Comment by baobabKoodaa | Hacker News Reader

The main issue is that you deceptively communicated what happens at the end of the free trial. You decided to use the wording "disruption", which implies that workloads will be stopped, which is the opposite of what happened. This is deceptive and predatory. I will never use your software and after this happened I am AMAZED that anybody else (particularly OP, but also anybody who read this post) will continue to trust you with their workloads. The way I look at this is: if you're willing to do deceptive and predatory billing, why wouldn't you be also willing to sell access to intelligence agencies or some other "grey area" party who wants to do supply chain hacks?

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This whole incident supplied them a lot more publicity. I had never heard of them before today. Since today, I'm more likely to use them, not less, because now I know they exist. I couldn't be less likely than zero.

Awful, but true.

This story is also educating people so if they do use them, they know in advance how they bill so won't be surprised.

Why would you want to use a provider, that resorts to shady practices, especially since there are a lot of alternatives out there?

Who cares how bad the free trial experience is if the paying customer experience is good?

Technically, here the paying customer experience was the problem, not the free trial one, because they were automatically upgraded.

Generally, you don't want to award people/companies that don't respect you. I'm not saying that you shouldn't re-evaluate them in the future, but they will walk away with the wrong lesson if you just start throwing money at them.

The problem here was with the free trial.

If you view it through a paying customer lens instead, then all you see is a paying customer who chose not to pay their invoice and might get sued. There's nothing strange about that.

All of the problem here was with the transition from free trial to paying customer.

Personally I do care if I get hacked or if my clients get hacked. If you don't care, you don't care, I guess. For you it's enough that the "paying customer experience" (???) is good, whatever that is. Okay buddy.

Hey -

First off, fair point on the free tier email. This fits in the same theme of clarity vs. trust for me: if we say disruption, but then leave your account enabled, that still feels deceptive even if it seems generous to us. We will fix.

On your last point - I just want to note that this isn't a money-maker for us. Runner bills can be large (as they were here!), and we explicitly wanted to avoid actual charges to the user in favor of not collecting for a good amount of usage. Again, there's a clarity/trust tension there that you're right to call out, but the end goal is that more people can use cheaper, faster runners.

We earn that trust today by being extremely easy to use and delivering on what we promise, and we need to add clarity to that list. Thanks for the feedback.

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