5 ms·

Known Issue: Charged full price of Fi device after financing

45 points by danepowell 7y ago

King-Aaron 7y ago
This could easily cripple people on low incomes. Not good enough for a company the size of Google.
- Sendotsh 7y ago
  The flow-on damage of billing errors like this can be immense. Ive seen it first hand, and the people working for these companies generally have no idea how much an overdraft fee can ruin someone’s life in the short/medium term. If the refund isn’t fast enough it also leads to missed rent and bills, all of which have fees for being late, plus possible debt collector issues as most utility companies will send a single missed bill directly to collections these days. Not to mention inability to buy food, gas/transport to work, etc.
  - Johnny555 7y ago
    if the cost of your cell phone means you can't buy food, the you've bought more phone than you can afford. If covering the unexpected full-value cost of your phone is more painful than transferring money from your savings account, then you should have bought a cheaper phone.
    - King-Aaron 7y ago
      This is a naive comment, there are complexities in many peoples lives where even someone on a reasonable income may be caught short when 500-1000 dollars is deducted from them without warning.
      - Johnny555 7y ago
        No doubt -- $1000 is a lot of money to many people. Those are the people that shouldn't have purchased a $1000 phone. A $150 Moto G6 may not be as fast as a flagship phone, and may not have a great screen or camera, but if paying to price of the phone upfront means the difference between putting food on the table or not, buy the cheap phone and build up your emergency fund. What happens if their unaffordable phone is lost or stolen?
        imtringued 7y ago
        I don't get this. $1000 is not a lot of money if you spread it over 2 years or even 5 years. I still use a 5 year old flagship. In other words it can be the sensible choice if you're willing to plan ahead, compared to just buying the cheapest stuff you can find and then throw it away after it breaks due to the lower quality. My micro USB port is wearing out and it is difficult to charge the phone. I will most likely have to get a new one in 2019. Features like wireless charging or waterproofing that would extend the life of my phone are mostly only available to flagships. On top of these benefits you also simply get a better phone. So now suddenly a company screws over people and it affects poor people disproportionately. Of course it's the fault of those poor people because they failed to plan their finances correctly and shouldn't have bought an expensive phone. Except they can afford the advertised plan and perhaps they even have chosen a phone according to the points I mentioned above because it will save them money in the long run. So why are we blaming the customers and defending the company's disgusting behavior? Do you really think it should be normal that companies are screwing you and it should be the responsibility of the customer to defend himself against what basically amounts to fraud?
        King-Aaron 7y ago
        What's naive is thinking that a person who gets seriously inconvenienced by a thousand dollars disappearing is immediately the same as someone who struggles to put food on the table - I feel there is a disconnect in your view of the kinds of middle income earners who we're describing here. I think the legs on your horse may also be too high. If someone has a mortgage, kids, other large outgoings etc, they are sill easily able to afford a flagship device. However a sudden hit to the monthly budget that's an order of magnitude larger than normal will ruffle most (i.e. easily over 50%) of borrowers.
        Johnny555 7y ago
        It wasn't my suggestion that this would make people unable to buy food, I was replying to this comment: Not to mention inability to buy food, gas/transport to work, etc. If a $1000 phone is an order of magnitude over your monthly budget, then your monthly budget is only $100. ...still easily able to afford a flagship device. If they can't pay upfront, it doesn't sound like they can easily afford the device. I'm not wealthy by any stretch but my automatic overdraft protection on my checking is over 2x my entire monthly budget. it's not free to use but it would keep me from bouncing checks until I can transfer money from my emergency fund. If I had an unexpected $1000 charge it would come out of that overdraft protection.
    - jstarfish 7y ago
      Having the note called without warning was not part of the service agreement, financial circumstances of the customer be damned. Google fucked a lot of people by error. Its not the victims' burden to prove they didnt deserve it.
      - Johnny555 7y ago
        Oh I don't disagree, Google screwed up big-time, but people need to use some fiscal restraint before they blame Google for getting evicted or not being able to pay for food.
        oarsinsync 7y ago
        "Overcharging" is a lovely euphemism for something that is tantamount to theft. You agree to give me $10/month, and trust me with access to your wallet to remove that $10. I take out $1000 and walk off leaving you an IOU that you will get back once I can be bothered to get my thumb out and pay you. The only thing you did wrong in this instance was trust someone with access to your money. Unless you never make a card payment, you're always having to make that allowance of trust. It's not okay on an individual level, and it's even less okay coming from a billion dollar corporation. Mistakes happen, but unless there's a penalty to those committing the mistake, there's no incentive to not make more of the same mistakes in future.
    - marak830 7y ago
      Wow. Just in case you haven't realised from the other responses, your rather entitled. Not everyone is in a position to deal with large unexpected bills. Maybe you should learn to have a little empathy.
      - Johnny555 7y ago
        Entitled? I wanted a Pixel 3 but couldn't justify spending $900 on a cell phone so got a Nokia 7.1 for about half the price.
        marak830 7y ago
        And forbid you purchase that on some sort of payment plan so you can get it. . . And then have them charge full value all of a sudden
    - sk0g 7y ago
      > "if the cost of your home means you can't buy food, the you've bought more home than you can afford. > If covering the unexpected full-value cost of your home is more painful than transferring money from your savings account, then you should have bought a cheaper home" I too can be out of touch with reality, see?
    - dang 7y ago
      Please don't scold others on HN. It makes for worse conversation. Actually, "please don't scold" could be a new guideline for https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- nexuist 7y ago
  This should be illegal, or at the very least, Google should be required to reimburse any fees incurred as a result of this misstep. When you hand over your bank account to an organization, especially one as legitimate as Google, you are doing so with the implicit trust that they will charge you what you expect them to charge you for. Breaching this trust should have consequences, just like individuals failing to pay their rent has consequences.
  - mindslight 7y ago
    What should be illegal is overdraft fees themselves. They are nothing but a flimsy pretext to steal money from customer accounts. It is possible to find checking accounts that will treat negative balances as simple interest-only loans. At least one of the major online banks does this if you set it up that way.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    Maybe google should just get banned from doing wire transfers to and from personal bank accounts for a couple of years. Just like everyone else that fucks up like this.
- Alex3917 7y ago
  > This could easily cripple people on low incomes. To keep this in perspective, Google Fi costs substantially more than every other phone plan unless you travel internationally on a regular basis.
  - vinay427 7y ago
    I don't use it, but it's probably great for people who use minimal mobile data, and perhaps a few other random use cases.
  - ahelwer 7y ago
    I pay around $35/month, is that substantially more than every other phone plan? I am planning to switch off in the future though, for whatever privacy gains are possible through avoiding Google.
    - xeroaura 7y ago
      That sounds like 1.5GB of data/month? You can probably beat that with a MVNO, but not any of the main US carriers. Extreme example being like mint mobile which does bulk purchases (3,6,12months) and goes down as cheap as $15/month for 3GB of LTE. If you have Comcast home internet, you might be able to use Xfinity Mobile (only BYOP for iPhone atm but they do have a few $100 backs for some phones on their site). It costs $0 for calling/text and $12/gig.
      - Alex3917 7y ago
        T-mobile is $40 per month with unlimited data, and $30 per month if you have 4+ lines.
        Johnny555 7y ago
        The only single line unlimited plan I see at T-Mobile is $70/month.
        7y ago
mythrwy 7y ago
Lots of angry people in the comments. Apparently it did affect a number of them quite badly. What seems strange to me, (and not judging it's just a little weird) are the amount of people hit up for $900-$1000 phones that are overdrawn or cannot buy gas etc because of this event. And certainly that can be a big surprise charge but you still have to pay the $1000 over time, what's wrong with a $250 phone? Maybe I'm a cheapo who only buys $250 phones and so doesn't understand how much better the $1000 ones are. But if things are that tight it just doesn't seem like the most logical thing to spend extra money on. Even future money a bit at a time. Probably there are reasons I don't understand.
- Johnny555 7y ago
  Not sure why you got downvoted so much, you make a valid point, like maybe this guy shouldn't have bought a thousand dollar phone: Google, because of your ADMITTED MISTAKE, my rent check on Monday is now going to bounce. I very well could get evicted from my house over this. What is your plan to make sure I do not get evicted, or is Google going to pay for a new place for me to rent if this happens?
  - marak830 7y ago
    I purchased x item at monthly payment of y, now I'm being charged a lump sum and it's throwing off my books. Shit strip out the what and it could screw over most people who don't have a large savings account (hell I do, but it's not linked to my main account, so I'd get screwed as well and I'm fairly well off). I'm sorry Johnny but the way you have been acting in this thread really makes me doubt your sincerity, or wonder how damn entitled you are.
  - jplayer01 7y ago
    I’m not sure what any of this has to do with Google charging the full amount despite these people being on payment plans. It wouldn't be acceptable for any other provider to do this and it isn't acceptable for Google. The state of these peoples' finances makes this worse, and doesn't absolve Google. It's incredible the mental gymnastics well-off people will do to shift the blame to the poor instead of the weak, vulnerable billion dollar enterprises that fuck up. This guy took the payment plan according to what he thought was able to pay monthly. And until Google charged him $1000 out of nowhere, that was fine. That's all there is to it.
bubblethink 7y ago
Google Fi seems to have largely failed in achieving any meaningful goals. It had some promise early on, but its value proposition is pretty thin. Main points against: 1) Has fallen into the same trap of subsidizing expensive phones and phone plans over long periods and other rubbish discount deals for signing up (used to be the much hated contract model earlier with other carriers, but this is not very different) 2) Not a real carrier in a standards compliant way (or at least there is no open reference implementation). Needs play services blobs to do anything intelligent 3) Needs google account 4) Mucks up google voice 5) Not really price competitive for data The only real thing going for it at the moment is roaming benefits. Once other carriers undercut that, what remains ? It anyway has low name recognition and no retail presence.
- cdaringe 7y ago
  Fantastic customer service, achievable low cost of ownership
- RL_Quine 7y ago
  It works for me quite well, but that’s because I’m almost always roaming. The experience of being able to have a pocket full of data SIMs at no code is great. Mostly I never see it, or think about it, it just works. Though honestly I’m sort of concerned for when it suddenly doesn’t.
  - billh 7y ago
    The same-rate international data is what keeps me on Fi. It's great not to have to worry about taking it in the shorts by the phone company when traveling somewhere. A friend of mine has one of the majors as his carrier and they were charging him $10/day for data in Europe, in 2019 that's just insane.
benguild 7y ago
The data’s too expensive on Fi. It’s worth it for roaming but I’m dual-SIMing AT&T in New York because why pay overage rates for basic? I love having the service but financially I hope they sort some of this stuff out. It could attract more people, too.

45 points by danepowell 7y ago

King-Aaron 7y ago

This could easily cripple people on low incomes. Not good enough for a company the size of Google.

Sendotsh 7y ago
The flow-on damage of billing errors like this can be immense. Ive seen it first hand, and the people working for these companies generally have no idea how much an overdraft fee can ruin someone’s life in the short/medium term. If the refund isn’t fast enough it also leads to missed rent and bills, all of which have fees for being late, plus possible debt collector issues as most utility companies will send a single missed bill directly to collections these days. Not to mention inability to buy food, gas/transport to work, etc.
- Johnny555 7y ago
  if the cost of your cell phone means you can't buy food, the you've bought more phone than you can afford. If covering the unexpected full-value cost of your phone is more painful than transferring money from your savings account, then you should have bought a cheaper phone.
  - King-Aaron 7y ago
    This is a naive comment, there are complexities in many peoples lives where even someone on a reasonable income may be caught short when 500-1000 dollars is deducted from them without warning.
    - Johnny555 7y ago
      No doubt -- $1000 is a lot of money to many people. Those are the people that shouldn't have purchased a $1000 phone. A $150 Moto G6 may not be as fast as a flagship phone, and may not have a great screen or camera, but if paying to price of the phone upfront means the difference between putting food on the table or not, buy the cheap phone and build up your emergency fund. What happens if their unaffordable phone is lost or stolen?
      - imtringued 7y ago
        I don't get this. $1000 is not a lot of money if you spread it over 2 years or even 5 years. I still use a 5 year old flagship. In other words it can be the sensible choice if you're willing to plan ahead, compared to just buying the cheapest stuff you can find and then throw it away after it breaks due to the lower quality. My micro USB port is wearing out and it is difficult to charge the phone. I will most likely have to get a new one in 2019. Features like wireless charging or waterproofing that would extend the life of my phone are mostly only available to flagships. On top of these benefits you also simply get a better phone. So now suddenly a company screws over people and it affects poor people disproportionately. Of course it's the fault of those poor people because they failed to plan their finances correctly and shouldn't have bought an expensive phone. Except they can afford the advertised plan and perhaps they even have chosen a phone according to the points I mentioned above because it will save them money in the long run. So why are we blaming the customers and defending the company's disgusting behavior? Do you really think it should be normal that companies are screwing you and it should be the responsibility of the customer to defend himself against what basically amounts to fraud?
      - King-Aaron 7y ago
        What's naive is thinking that a person who gets seriously inconvenienced by a thousand dollars disappearing is immediately the same as someone who struggles to put food on the table - I feel there is a disconnect in your view of the kinds of middle income earners who we're describing here. I think the legs on your horse may also be too high. If someone has a mortgage, kids, other large outgoings etc, they are sill easily able to afford a flagship device. However a sudden hit to the monthly budget that's an order of magnitude larger than normal will ruffle most (i.e. easily over 50%) of borrowers.
        Johnny555 7y ago
        It wasn't my suggestion that this would make people unable to buy food, I was replying to this comment: Not to mention inability to buy food, gas/transport to work, etc. If a $1000 phone is an order of magnitude over your monthly budget, then your monthly budget is only $100. ...still easily able to afford a flagship device. If they can't pay upfront, it doesn't sound like they can easily afford the device. I'm not wealthy by any stretch but my automatic overdraft protection on my checking is over 2x my entire monthly budget. it's not free to use but it would keep me from bouncing checks until I can transfer money from my emergency fund. If I had an unexpected $1000 charge it would come out of that overdraft protection.
  - jstarfish 7y ago
    Having the note called without warning was not part of the service agreement, financial circumstances of the customer be damned. Google fucked a lot of people by error. Its not the victims' burden to prove they didnt deserve it.
    - Johnny555 7y ago
      Oh I don't disagree, Google screwed up big-time, but people need to use some fiscal restraint before they blame Google for getting evicted or not being able to pay for food.
      - oarsinsync 7y ago
        "Overcharging" is a lovely euphemism for something that is tantamount to theft. You agree to give me $10/month, and trust me with access to your wallet to remove that $10. I take out $1000 and walk off leaving you an IOU that you will get back once I can be bothered to get my thumb out and pay you. The only thing you did wrong in this instance was trust someone with access to your money. Unless you never make a card payment, you're always having to make that allowance of trust. It's not okay on an individual level, and it's even less okay coming from a billion dollar corporation. Mistakes happen, but unless there's a penalty to those committing the mistake, there's no incentive to not make more of the same mistakes in future.
  - marak830 7y ago
    Wow. Just in case you haven't realised from the other responses, your rather entitled. Not everyone is in a position to deal with large unexpected bills. Maybe you should learn to have a little empathy.
    - Johnny555 7y ago
      Entitled? I wanted a Pixel 3 but couldn't justify spending $900 on a cell phone so got a Nokia 7.1 for about half the price.
      - marak830 7y ago
        And forbid you purchase that on some sort of payment plan so you can get it. . . And then have them charge full value all of a sudden
  - sk0g 7y ago
    > "if the cost of your home means you can't buy food, the you've bought more home than you can afford. > If covering the unexpected full-value cost of your home is more painful than transferring money from your savings account, then you should have bought a cheaper home" I too can be out of touch with reality, see?
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't scold others on HN. It makes for worse conversation. Actually, "please don't scold" could be a new guideline for https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
nexuist 7y ago
This should be illegal, or at the very least, Google should be required to reimburse any fees incurred as a result of this misstep. When you hand over your bank account to an organization, especially one as legitimate as Google, you are doing so with the implicit trust that they will charge you what you expect them to charge you for. Breaching this trust should have consequences, just like individuals failing to pay their rent has consequences.
- mindslight 7y ago
  What should be illegal is overdraft fees themselves. They are nothing but a flimsy pretext to steal money from customer accounts. It is possible to find checking accounts that will treat negative balances as simple interest-only loans. At least one of the major online banks does this if you set it up that way.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Maybe google should just get banned from doing wire transfers to and from personal bank accounts for a couple of years. Just like everyone else that fucks up like this.
Alex3917 7y ago
> This could easily cripple people on low incomes. To keep this in perspective, Google Fi costs substantially more than every other phone plan unless you travel internationally on a regular basis.
- vinay427 7y ago
  I don't use it, but it's probably great for people who use minimal mobile data, and perhaps a few other random use cases.
- ahelwer 7y ago
  I pay around $35/month, is that substantially more than every other phone plan? I am planning to switch off in the future though, for whatever privacy gains are possible through avoiding Google.
  - xeroaura 7y ago
    That sounds like 1.5GB of data/month? You can probably beat that with a MVNO, but not any of the main US carriers. Extreme example being like mint mobile which does bulk purchases (3,6,12months) and goes down as cheap as $15/month for 3GB of LTE. If you have Comcast home internet, you might be able to use Xfinity Mobile (only BYOP for iPhone atm but they do have a few $100 backs for some phones on their site). It costs $0 for calling/text and $12/gig.
    - Alex3917 7y ago
      T-mobile is $40 per month with unlimited data, and $30 per month if you have 4+ lines.
      - Johnny555 7y ago
        The only single line unlimited plan I see at T-Mobile is $70/month.
        7y ago

mythrwy 7y ago

Lots of angry people in the comments. Apparently it did affect a number of them quite badly. What seems strange to me, (and not judging it's just a little weird) are the amount of people hit up for $900-$1000 phones that are overdrawn or cannot buy gas etc because of this event. And certainly that can be a big surprise charge but you still have to pay the $1000 over time, what's wrong with a $250 phone? Maybe I'm a cheapo who only buys $250 phones and so doesn't understand how much better the $1000 ones are. But if things are that tight it just doesn't seem like the most logical thing to spend extra money on. Even future money a bit at a time. Probably there are reasons I don't understand.

Johnny555 7y ago
Not sure why you got downvoted so much, you make a valid point, like maybe this guy shouldn't have bought a thousand dollar phone: Google, because of your ADMITTED MISTAKE, my rent check on Monday is now going to bounce. I very well could get evicted from my house over this. What is your plan to make sure I do not get evicted, or is Google going to pay for a new place for me to rent if this happens?
- marak830 7y ago
  I purchased x item at monthly payment of y, now I'm being charged a lump sum and it's throwing off my books. Shit strip out the what and it could screw over most people who don't have a large savings account (hell I do, but it's not linked to my main account, so I'd get screwed as well and I'm fairly well off). I'm sorry Johnny but the way you have been acting in this thread really makes me doubt your sincerity, or wonder how damn entitled you are.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  I’m not sure what any of this has to do with Google charging the full amount despite these people being on payment plans. It wouldn't be acceptable for any other provider to do this and it isn't acceptable for Google. The state of these peoples' finances makes this worse, and doesn't absolve Google. It's incredible the mental gymnastics well-off people will do to shift the blame to the poor instead of the weak, vulnerable billion dollar enterprises that fuck up. This guy took the payment plan according to what he thought was able to pay monthly. And until Google charged him $1000 out of nowhere, that was fine. That's all there is to it.

bubblethink 7y ago

Google Fi seems to have largely failed in achieving any meaningful goals. It had some promise early on, but its value proposition is pretty thin. Main points against: 1) Has fallen into the same trap of subsidizing expensive phones and phone plans over long periods and other rubbish discount deals for signing up (used to be the much hated contract model earlier with other carriers, but this is not very different) 2) Not a real carrier in a standards compliant way (or at least there is no open reference implementation). Needs play services blobs to do anything intelligent 3) Needs google account 4) Mucks up google voice 5) Not really price competitive for data The only real thing going for it at the moment is roaming benefits. Once other carriers undercut that, what remains ? It anyway has low name recognition and no retail presence.

cdaringe 7y ago
Fantastic customer service, achievable low cost of ownership
RL_Quine 7y ago
It works for me quite well, but that’s because I’m almost always roaming. The experience of being able to have a pocket full of data SIMs at no code is great. Mostly I never see it, or think about it, it just works. Though honestly I’m sort of concerned for when it suddenly doesn’t.
- billh 7y ago
  The same-rate international data is what keeps me on Fi. It's great not to have to worry about taking it in the shorts by the phone company when traveling somewhere. A friend of mine has one of the majors as his carrier and they were charging him $10/day for data in Europe, in 2019 that's just insane.

benguild 7y ago

The data’s too expensive on Fi. It’s worth it for roaming but I’m dual-SIMing AT&T in New York because why pay overage rates for basic? I love having the service but financially I hope they sort some of this stuff out. It could attract more people, too.