7 ms·

Please share your method of uncovering, in advance, undocumented limits inherent in software; it's desperately needed. The guy left a free trial for another fr

Please share your method of uncovering, in advance, undocumented limits inherent in software; it's desperately needed. The guy left a free trial for another free trial; if he's at fault we're all at fault every time we change our go-to software. The lesson might be that "there be dragons" - you should guess that any "better" program or SaaS out there is less that half of what it says once unknown limits have been discovered.

Spooky23 10y ago
Customer: Hello vendor, we're a customer with tens of thousands of active users and no intention to pay. How many users can you support in your free tier? How do you handle situations with high message volumes? You should engage with the vendor. Perhaps there are intangible benefits to the vendor for you to use them even at no cost (PR, testing opportunity, etc) Generally speaking, if you are dependent on a free service to do your business, you are fucked. A friend is a policy consultant who relied on Google Reader to be his knowledge repository. He bills the equivalent of $800/hr and was nearly paralyzed as it went away.
dahart 10y ago
It's called "due diligence", and people do it all the time. He didn't change his own personal go-to software, we're not talking about a trial of a video game here. He changed the software for thousands of his users. He put thousands of people on a free trial for something that was not obviously going to work. You do have the option to investigate before you make that kind of move. If you choose not to exercise it, you don't have that much ground to stand on when things don't work out.
- zedadex 10y ago
  The due diligence in this case would have been researching the user limits which (as others have pointed out) were not published or advertised anywhere.
  - dahart 10y ago
    There's a reason it's called "diligence", because it typically involves trying. Personally, I don't count reading a company's ad copy on their own web page as being even remotely diligent or doing much research. Normally 'due diligence' involves talking to the party you intend to engage with, as well as talking to others who have experience with that party. The author didn't mention any of that. Other users here also pointed out that there is a known specific API error message for the user limit. That kind of thing could be uncovered with a little diligence. Author could also have setup a fake team and tried to add many users before putting 8k real users on the team and just hoping. He did finally start talking directly to Slack only after he started having trouble, and they responded and disclosed the existence of a team size limit. This obviously could have happened before hitting the limit. The author expressed incredulity at what would be a $500k price tag, and yet completely fails to see why that is a massive glaring red flag. That alone should have been enough signal that his plan was skating on thin ice, but instead he drove right past all the warning signs and then blamed Slack for it.
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      Trying a huge number of users? How without migrating? He could have asked innumerable questions all of which contradicted the description of what he was getting. He couldn't have known which was the right question. I very rarely query in person before a purchase; I did recently and was given a flatly wrong answer on one question, and then a very positive answer that wasn't logically coherent (strongly suggesting a no, in truth) on a second question. I'm buying anyway, but unless you can phone a corporate head, querying customer support for arcane technical information is rarely a great way to get the right answer, in my experience (sorry to say.) UNLESS you already have a proven fail, of course - which he did. If it were my program there'd be an error message in there no matter what the upper limit was; I assume others are as competent. I also don't follow your logic re the high price tag somehow logically entailing a secret limit on the free product - unless you're implying that it's a trap, a way of phishing for phools. (In my country, an illegal bait and switch, actually.) That's something that doesn't work too well when you're peddling to corporations, the pool is small and word gets around too fast.
- cammio 10y ago
  troll
  - dahart 10y ago
    Hahahaha! I upvoted you because that's funny. But word to the wise; this kind of comment, even if you're joking, can get flagged and backfire badly on HN. If you're serious, I'd like to invite you to share your reasoning for your insult. I gave a direct answer to a direct question from @Nomentatus, and had no intention of saying something inflammatory.
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      You're correct, I did use sarcasm; I probably did come close near the edge. Certainly had I been appalled in a poor cause my comment would have been flaggable. So I'll bear your reservation in mind, although I do find wit too tempting to keep it to myself, usually. My family is in part Prussian, and this is an example, now that I look at it, of fabled Prussian sarcasm, which I became familiar with (at the sharp end) from my grandmother, and didn't like, much.
      - dahart 10y ago
        Oh, hey, your comment was fine! Don't worry, you didn't do anything wrong. :) My comment immediately above wasn't directed at you at all. I replied to @cammio who said only "troll" in response to me. His commment did get flagged and was later killed. I suspect when that happens, some people can't see the dead comment, depending on their profile settings. My comment was getting upvoted until the one I replied to got killed, and then it started getting downvoted, so I was suspecting other people also couldn't tell what I had replied to and mistook it for you. I should have quoted what I was replying to. C'est la vie.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

Spooky23 10y ago

Customer: Hello vendor, we're a customer with tens of thousands of active users and no intention to pay. How many users can you support in your free tier? How do you handle situations with high message volumes? You should engage with the vendor. Perhaps there are intangible benefits to the vendor for you to use them even at no cost (PR, testing opportunity, etc) Generally speaking, if you are dependent on a free service to do your business, you are fucked. A friend is a policy consultant who relied on Google Reader to be his knowledge repository. He bills the equivalent of $800/hr and was nearly paralyzed as it went away.

dahart 10y ago

It's called "due diligence", and people do it all the time. He didn't change his own personal go-to software, we're not talking about a trial of a video game here. He changed the software for thousands of his users. He put thousands of people on a free trial for something that was not obviously going to work. You do have the option to investigate before you make that kind of move. If you choose not to exercise it, you don't have that much ground to stand on when things don't work out.

zedadex 10y ago
The due diligence in this case would have been researching the user limits which (as others have pointed out) were not published or advertised anywhere.
- dahart 10y ago
  There's a reason it's called "diligence", because it typically involves trying. Personally, I don't count reading a company's ad copy on their own web page as being even remotely diligent or doing much research. Normally 'due diligence' involves talking to the party you intend to engage with, as well as talking to others who have experience with that party. The author didn't mention any of that. Other users here also pointed out that there is a known specific API error message for the user limit. That kind of thing could be uncovered with a little diligence. Author could also have setup a fake team and tried to add many users before putting 8k real users on the team and just hoping. He did finally start talking directly to Slack only after he started having trouble, and they responded and disclosed the existence of a team size limit. This obviously could have happened before hitting the limit. The author expressed incredulity at what would be a $500k price tag, and yet completely fails to see why that is a massive glaring red flag. That alone should have been enough signal that his plan was skating on thin ice, but instead he drove right past all the warning signs and then blamed Slack for it.
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    Trying a huge number of users? How without migrating? He could have asked innumerable questions all of which contradicted the description of what he was getting. He couldn't have known which was the right question. I very rarely query in person before a purchase; I did recently and was given a flatly wrong answer on one question, and then a very positive answer that wasn't logically coherent (strongly suggesting a no, in truth) on a second question. I'm buying anyway, but unless you can phone a corporate head, querying customer support for arcane technical information is rarely a great way to get the right answer, in my experience (sorry to say.) UNLESS you already have a proven fail, of course - which he did. If it were my program there'd be an error message in there no matter what the upper limit was; I assume others are as competent. I also don't follow your logic re the high price tag somehow logically entailing a secret limit on the free product - unless you're implying that it's a trap, a way of phishing for phools. (In my country, an illegal bait and switch, actually.) That's something that doesn't work too well when you're peddling to corporations, the pool is small and word gets around too fast.
cammio 10y ago
troll
- dahart 10y ago
  Hahahaha! I upvoted you because that's funny. But word to the wise; this kind of comment, even if you're joking, can get flagged and backfire badly on HN. If you're serious, I'd like to invite you to share your reasoning for your insult. I gave a direct answer to a direct question from @Nomentatus, and had no intention of saying something inflammatory.
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    You're correct, I did use sarcasm; I probably did come close near the edge. Certainly had I been appalled in a poor cause my comment would have been flaggable. So I'll bear your reservation in mind, although I do find wit too tempting to keep it to myself, usually. My family is in part Prussian, and this is an example, now that I look at it, of fabled Prussian sarcasm, which I became familiar with (at the sharp end) from my grandmother, and didn't like, much.
    - dahart 10y ago
      Oh, hey, your comment was fine! Don't worry, you didn't do anything wrong. :) My comment immediately above wasn't directed at you at all. I replied to @cammio who said only "troll" in response to me. His commment did get flagged and was later killed. I suspect when that happens, some people can't see the dead comment, depending on their profile settings. My comment was getting upvoted until the one I replied to got killed, and then it started getting downvoted, so I was suspecting other people also couldn't tell what I had replied to and mistook it for you. I should have quoted what I was replying to. C'est la vie.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]