Comment by rybosworld

This is true for all businesses but maybe more so for tech:

Don't have a business model that charges customers for your mistakes.

This customers bandwidth usage jumped from free tier to $100k in very short time. To be honest, this shouldn't even be possible. Any "free" tier that allows for a surprise $100k bill is not a free tier.

This bandwidth usage is the result of a mistake on Netlify's part. That much seems clear.

To go and suggest that the customer is responsible for any portion of the bill is where things really went sour imo. Don't do this. Ever. Unless you want your company to go viral for all the wrong reasons.

If you want another good example of how badly this can backfire, look at what happened when Unity announced their new pricing scheme. Unity's new pricing scheme also allowed for unbounded bills. At first they didn't even deny this. Later they said it was a customer misunderstanding. I.e., they blamed the customer for their mistake.

Thankfully, the CEO of Unity was fired.

The lessons are very straightforward:

1) Don't implement predatory pricing schemes (this can even be done unintentionally, but the intent doesn't matter).

2) If you do implement predatory pricing, the worst thing you can do is put on your surprised pikachu face when the customer asks why their bill is bigger than their annual income.