Comment by leerob
10 months ago
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.
This isn't the case. If they received this email, it was because they were under the included credits amount. This way, even if they missed the email, they will have six months and we will continue to follow up. If you have a sponsorship, feel free to reach out to me and we can talk about it.