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I'm going to go against the grain here and say it's partly Heroku's fault. If a customer is paying hundreds of dollars a week for a feature they're not using, t

I'm going to go against the grain here and say it's partly Heroku's fault. If a customer is paying hundreds of dollars a week for a feature they're not using, that's the time to send a friendly automated email saying "Is everything okay?". This is especially important with a service such as Heroku, where users will be changing these settings all the time and so there's a high probability of human error.

dotBen 16y ago
I can think of loads of reasons why you might be legitimately in that situation... Perhaps you intentionally provisioned a large amount of headroom for a forthcoming expected/possible traffic spike. In that example it would be annoying to get "are you sure you want to have this extra resource running?" emails. (sure, you should be building the system to auto-provision but that would have required a better programmer and you just got the interns to build it, etc)
- alextgordon 16y ago
  I get tons of emails saying "Would you like to buy viagra?". Getting an occasional email saying "You might be paying us too much money" is low on my list of annoyances.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    Not only that, but I will almost never be annoyed by someone who says "wait, are you sure you really want to pay us that much?"
  - X-Istence 16y ago
    My bank emails me when I withdraw over a certain amount, they send me a text message and sometimes will give me a call. Those are not annoyances, those are safety guards I want in place.
- novum 16y ago
  I think it'd be a useful feature for a good number of their users. It should be able to extrapolate based on previous usage, and notify me if I'm extremely outside my average historical utilization rate. They ought to allow you to set a sensitivity or threshold, and they also ought to let you opt out altogether.
- jaf656s 16y ago
  They could give you the option to turn off the notification if enough people complained about it, though I doubt they would. I don't usually find it annoying when a company goes out of their way to look out for my best interests, especially if it could cost them money short-term.
plasticbuddha 16y ago
If it's not Heroku's fault in some partial way, then look at it from another perspective. It's an opportunity for Heroku's competitors in a market that is quickly becoming commoditized. At the very least it's a feature that I always look for when using pay on demand services, and will rank very highly on my list of important to have features. Akamai comes to mind as an example of a company that has always had similar issues. If I ever were to use them in the future, I would have to factor into their monthly costs the partial FTE required to manage their usage and costs. More importantly, if there are other CDNs that offer better cost management features, I would almost certainly use them before ever using Akamai again, unless there was no other technical option.

dotBen 16y ago

I can think of loads of reasons why you might be legitimately in that situation... Perhaps you intentionally provisioned a large amount of headroom for a forthcoming expected/possible traffic spike. In that example it would be annoying to get "are you sure you want to have this extra resource running?" emails. (sure, you should be building the system to auto-provision but that would have required a better programmer and you just got the interns to build it, etc)

alextgordon 16y ago
I get tons of emails saying "Would you like to buy viagra?". Getting an occasional email saying "You might be paying us too much money" is low on my list of annoyances.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Not only that, but I will almost never be annoyed by someone who says "wait, are you sure you really want to pay us that much?"
- X-Istence 16y ago
  My bank emails me when I withdraw over a certain amount, they send me a text message and sometimes will give me a call. Those are not annoyances, those are safety guards I want in place.
novum 16y ago
I think it'd be a useful feature for a good number of their users. It should be able to extrapolate based on previous usage, and notify me if I'm extremely outside my average historical utilization rate. They ought to allow you to set a sensitivity or threshold, and they also ought to let you opt out altogether.
jaf656s 16y ago
They could give you the option to turn off the notification if enough people complained about it, though I doubt they would. I don't usually find it annoying when a company goes out of their way to look out for my best interests, especially if it could cost them money short-term.

plasticbuddha 16y ago

If it's not Heroku's fault in some partial way, then look at it from another perspective. It's an opportunity for Heroku's competitors in a market that is quickly becoming commoditized. At the very least it's a feature that I always look for when using pay on demand services, and will rank very highly on my list of important to have features. Akamai comes to mind as an example of a company that has always had similar issues. If I ever were to use them in the future, I would have to factor into their monthly costs the partial FTE required to manage their usage and costs. More importantly, if there are other CDNs that offer better cost management features, I would almost certainly use them before ever using Akamai again, unless there was no other technical option.