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Comment by ontoillogical | Hacker News Reader

I believe this is extremely unexpected behavior for an "auto-renew" feature. If I'm told that I will be autorenwing something in 7 days and am told about a price, that price changing within those 7 days feels like something the consumer should be protected against!

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How?! Hover is just a proxy between the customer and the real TLD owner. It could very well be that the TLD system saw that the domain was about to expire and decided to jack up the price then.

Maybe Hover could've bought the domain themselves when close to the expiration date to secure the lower price, but then if the customer decides to let the domain go it would be they holding out the bag.

Sounds more like the risk is on Hover then and not on the customer. If you advertise 38 dollars to me for a product you source from someone else and that the producer suddenly charges 100x the price you can’t just charge me that price because “that’s the price”.

You’re making money as a middleman, you accept the risk of a middleman.

The domain renewal cost in their dashboard is notably right back to $38 too!

Absolutely take a screenshot of this and your prior charges and dispute this with your bank.

Maybe .sexy TLD owner decided that "onlyfans" is a "premium" domain, with special pricing.

And registrar isn't aware of premium domain pricing (at least for that TLD).

The issue isn't that the price changed. The issue is that they auto charged after the price was quoted lower. If the registrar had said, "hey the price just got jacked way up, do you still want to buy this?" There would be no issue.

But because they said the price was x and not 100x, but then charged 100x, there is a real problem.

I agree but they did send two emails with the 100x price once it changed.

It would be nice to get an email specifically about the price change not just the auto renew but that's hardly a rug pull.

I cannot imagine that I would assume that the price had changed in the 4 days between the first and second emails. Until reading this post, I didn't even think that was a possibility. Clearly grounds for a chargeback if the 7 day email was explicit about the $38 price. Maybe it was the TLD and not Hover that triggered the price change but I'm sure that this isn't the first time this has happened and I can guarantee Hover is aware of this possibility and simply chooses to ignore it. I don't think Hover's fault can be dismissed but whatever, chargeback.

Let's say you grab a can of Coke in the grocery store, shelf sticker says 49c. When you pass on the cash register, it clearly shows $5k in the cashier's monitor, and the point of sales screen, so you're charged $5k.

Ooops, says the grocery store: Coca-cola raised the prices, not me.

Have you used amazon subscribe and save? What you described is basically how it works. You're agreeing to auto-buy at whatever price amazon sets on that day. The only exception when you first set up a subscription, in which case the first delivery's price is locked in.

Amazon will tell you the price 7 days before it auto-renews and then jack the price up 100x three days before it renews?

The price will fluctuate, but this is on another level, and deceptive since they had already stated what the price would be.

>Amazon will tell you the price 7 days before it auto-renews and then jack the price up 100x three days before it renews?

Yeah probably? [edit: no, see below]

You go on amazon 7 days before renewal, check your subscriptions, see it's $10. 7 days later it's no longer sold by amazon and the only other seller selling it is a scalper that charges $30. The only difference the order of magnitude, not whether price changes can happen.

No, that's not what happens. They lock in a price when they alert you to the upcoming delivery round.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

> The price of the item may decrease or increase between deliveries, but will never be higher than the price shown in your reminder email.

I sometimes get "item available" cancelations for this reason. The items are always available, just not at that price.

Thanks for the correction.

I'm not sure that analogy flies. Technically they did inform him of the price change ahead of time, they just didn't do a very good job. If I were them I'd add "PRICE CHANGE" or similar to the email subject, I feel like that's the least they can do.

The registrar is not "just a proxy". They are the merchant of record, they bear the financial and legal responsibility.

There can be a difference between whose the fault is, and who is accountable. Usually, the entity you paid is the one legally accountable to you. This is not just a trivial detail: you will have no luck with the law attempting to hold the other entity to account, even if they are at fault; while you can hold your counterparty to account even if their action was dictated by someone else; they have to act correctly with you- it's not your problem if their relationship with some other company is put into contention. This may not apply to domains, FWIW. usually, buying a domain means you have a contract with the registry too. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

This can big companies too, FWIW. Cisco were in violation of the GPL over the WRT54G, which resulted eventually in the release of OpwnWRT. Well, Cisco weren't the entity which actually caused that fault; the chip vendor was, as they were the ones who used the linux kernel without releasing the source. That is not a valid reason to violate a licence.

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