Comment by zephen
5 days ago
tl;dr:
"Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it."
It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards.
You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger.
And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it valuable.
You have two choices. Pay up to keep using it, or stop.
The fact that you decided to pay up to keep using it is actually, imo, a pretty good advertisement for the service.
Billing statements disguised as marketing nudges is a cromulent business practice until the SaaS start sending bills to collections.
I think the author is being kind, both to themselves and startup practicing dark patterns. He walks through his own thinking, raises important questions and also gives the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t give.
IMHO, the article gets ahead of criticism well: accepting the valid critiques while also confining the weird/lazy ones to downvotes.
> Billing statements disguised as marketing nudges is a cromulent business practice until the SaaS start sending bills to collections.
Well, I should have probably said that instead of sued. But the intent is the same.
> I think the author is being kind, both to themselves and startup practicing dark patterns.
It's unclear it's a dark pattern. The author explicitly states that this particular EULA doesn't allow them to bill without a credit card.
But it's also unclear that this practice will survive the exposure on hacker news.
No, not because it's a "dark pattern" but because it enables customer dark patterns. Run up a bill and then go use something else.
It would be perfectly crumulent if it was explicitly communicated in advance.
There are two possibilities here:
1) They intended a bait-and-switch, where they were going to go after everybody for non-payment. According to the article, they might not even have a leg to stand on here.
2) If you take the quote from the company at face value, they realized that their free quota would be insufficient for conversion for some customers, and decided not to shut off services in the middle of evaluation. In this instance, the bill is a communication in advance -- if you provide a credit card in order to keep using our services, we want to get paid for everything you used after the free limit.
Now, you can argue (and many are) about whether this is a good business practice or not, but it really doesn't matter. After making the front page of hacker news, it's probably not one they're going to continue, simply because now that everybody knows about it, you'll probably have a lot of bad actors doing multiple signups, just to siphon off as much token usage as possible.
> In this instance, the bill is a communication in advance -- if you provide a credit card in order to keep using our services, we want to get paid for everything you used after the free limit.
That would be much more acceptable. If it worked out and you want to continue, you won't have a problem paying for the overage. If you decide it's not for you, then you can walk away and owe nothing. If it were communicated that way it would be a different situation.
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What's incromulent about suing people who racked up debts to you?
If you read the other comments, you're certainly an outlier in this belief.
My own answer is that there is nothing (incromulent? uncromulent? well, anyway, not cromulent) about suing people who knowingly and deliberately racked up debts with you, but that common business practices, including the overwhelming abundance of free services everywhere in every product category, and the ability to immediately shut off internet services when you aren't paid, lead to sort of a gestalt of expectations about how things are done.
The article itself says that the terms of service only allow billing if a payment method have been provided, so suing absent that provision would probably be a non-starter anyway.
On the bright? side, suing would definitely keep them on the front page of hacker news longer.
I find that exploiting a difference between expectations and reality is a common way to make money, but I'm no good at it myself. I'm cursed with engineer-brain instead of business-brain.
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