Comment by mtmail
10 months ago
I found somebody on twitter posting their email
https://x.com/ArnaudLigny/status/1801536871962489145
"Hey there,
Your team cecil is currently enrolled in the Vercel sponsorship program.
Your 100% off discount is expiring on June 14.
To give you time to handle this transition, we will automatically enroll your team into a $300/mo discount for the next 6 months, starting on June 14 and ending on December 14.
Thank you for partnering together with us.
Please reach out to sponsorships@vercel.com if you have any questions."
Hey there, I work at Vercel. Our sponsorship program has not ended. Some sponsorships have expired like this quoted email, but hopefully 6 months give them time to either re-apply or explore other options.
We haven’t been accepting new sponsorships while we update the existing program, but it’s still running and will accept sponsorships again, soon.
The communication on this is quite confusing. Are you saying that existing participants can apply for renewal? Was this a pre-existing expiration date, or something new? Why would you need to "pause" applications in order to make improvements? Are the "improvements" to benefit Vercel or to benefit open source participants?
It would have been far better to have communicated the answers to these questions up front.
I appreciate Vercels support for open source projects, past and future, and I certainly understand that Vercels support needs to and will evolve overtime. But for Vercels own benefit as well as the benefit of the projects you are supporting, it is important to make these announcements with clarity- and to provide plenty of notice.
You're not giving them 6 months. You're giving them 1 day, before they may end up even seeing the email and getting charged against their will. Even if they do see the email, 1 day is not enough for a change of service notification that would require a migration.
This is disgusting extortioniate behavior that would make me reconsider doing business with Vercel.
I'd agree that going from a free plan to a discounted plan but with unlimited potential for additional charges is an extremely problematic change. I would even suspect that any additional charges would not be enforceable here directly after the switch, but simply putting open source projects into a position where they face this danger if they didn't read their inbox for a day or didn't want to just shut down their infrastructure immediately is a rather hostile move.
They get 300$ per month free credit for 6 months - but the 1 day notice is to short imho
Yeah this is strange. If they are using, lets say $1000 in credits per day, then they will be charged $700 starting tomorrow. Like you said, they might not even see the email yet.
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Thank you for this context.
Giving a bunch of projects $300 a month in credits for six months is still far more than nearly any company does.
I wonder if they had projects legitimately consuming more than $300 a month of their services.
So nice of Vercel. As if their cash cow wasn’t one of those ‘sponsored’ projects. Just wait to see what they will do to svelte
At least their extortion is polite?
How is this extortion? 6 months is plenty of time to sort out an alternative if you need to (assuming an alternative is available).
going from $0 to $600/month even with discount with 1 day notice feels like extortion...
They don't have 6 months. They have 1 day. People might not even be checking their inboxes on this Friday, leading to unannounced charges in an unreasonable timeframe or the extortion of paying or having downtime.
Disgusting behavior.
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