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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

If any company I did business with changed the terms of the business such that I would be charged when I previously wasn't, and then they automatically charged me, I'd be absolutely livid, regardless of whether they sent me an email (that may or may not be sitting in the bottom of a spam folder) or not.

I don't think they should be on the hook for providing people with free service that costs them money if they need to change the terms, but it should be 100% manual opt-in (with people who don't opt-in having their service canceled) if it involves a price increase or wholly new charges where there were previously none.

Based on the fact that their apology seems centered around the email bug and not the initial premise of adding charges without users having to opt-in to them, I have to disagree with some of the comments here that this proves they "get" customer service.

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I think you're dead on. The apology is interesting for what they don't apologize for and one could fairly presume they'd do again: raise prices/fees as they feel like it and on an opt-out rather than opt-on basis.

No company deserves to have my credit card details tied to an account which may at some point arbitrarily charge me $$ which they notify my of via email on an opt-out basis. There are countless reasons why I might miss such an email not the least if which is simply email overload.

This is a terrible practice for your customers.

I see it the opposite way — I do not want my service arbitrarily canceled just because I didn't see an email sitting in the bottom of my spam folder. Unless we're talking about some exceptionally expensive service here, any plausible price increase is unlikely to be more upsetting than total loss of a service that I apparently considered worthwhile in the first place.

IMO, the best thing is to grandfather people in. The next best thing is to just let people know what's going on, move them over and offer a refund if they are dissatisfied with the new plan.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I will always fall on the side of companies not charging me unless I explicitly agree to the terms. Partly because I'm just wired that way and partly because I'm sick of companies trying to get in on that "gym membership"/AOL billing where they have a huge percentage of customers that don't even use the service but have just forgot they are being charged.

I've had it up to here with companies pulling shit like making joining one click on the web and cancelling a multi-hour phone call. So yeah I may be a bit sensitive and reactionary about billing matters but I believe it is justified given how poorly most companies handle these issues these days.

One does not simply change the conditions of a contract.

Of course not. That's why you put in the contract that you can raise prices with 30 days' notice.

So you believe a company can charge $99 for a yearly service and then say "by the way, we may increase prices in 30 days if we decide to do so." So what happens to the $99 I paid?

They breached the contract by charging the additional fees. A company can't change the terms and say "whoops, that plan didn't work better start charging for small orders."

> So you believe a company can charge $99 for a yearly service and then say "by the way, we may increase prices in 30 days if we decide to do so." So what happens to the $99 I paid?

Uh, it would still be paid? Price increases only apply to new billing cycles, not retroactively, so I don't understand what you're getting at here.

The point is that it's incredibly easy — and relatively standard — to incorporate the possibility of changes into a contract.

Which is not what happened.

I think chc meant "you can raise prices with 30 seconds' notice."

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