5 ms·

> The fix went out less than half an hour after they learned about it, The article says the issues started on Friday and users told them then. So, it seems to

by sgift 7y ago

> The fix went out less than half an hour after they learned about it, The article says the issues started on Friday and users told them then. So, it seems to be three days for a fix, not half an hour.

Supermancho 7y ago
> it seems to be three days for a fix, not half an hour. You are trying to conflate 2 different metrics. The first assertion, is from the time the ticket was investigated, not submitted. It might be useful to talk about expectation of service, since that's what you are getting at. 3 days (over a weekend) is reasonable for a free tier, I would think. For a paid tier, maybe it should be more immediate.
- dwaite 7y ago
  > 3 days (over a weekend) is reasonable for a free tier, I would think. For a paid tier, maybe it should be more immediate. This line of reasoning sounds backwards to me. It is the importance of the service that drives the needed level of reliability and people should expect there to be a cost to match that level of urgency and have guarantees that the vendor understands and will meet those needs. If LastPass expects user password management (aka consumer access to websites) to require under two 9's, they are wrong. If they can't meet a minimum level of reliability with a free tier, they should not be offering a free tier.
  - zaptheimpaler 7y ago
    That's one opinion. I'm happy with free and occasionally down rather than paid and always up.
  - dhhdysh2hd 7y ago
    They're obviously meeting a minimum reliability level for the free tier or else no one would be using it because they would find it too unreliable. The argument is about whether their resolution time for the free tier is acceptably fast which can be measured by how many people left the service because of this event. Paying money gets you better service is the other idea in what you quoted, it's hard to imagine why you wouldn't give people better service for paying money unless you were getting more value off them through practices such as data collection. But privacy activists hate the poor so it's pretty hard to thoroughly monetize the free tier without someone trying to start a boycott to make their world a better place.
- tzs 7y ago
  > 3 days (over a weekend) is reasonable for a free tier, I would think. For a paid tier, maybe it should be more immediate. For most services, I'd expect free tiers to be strict subsets of paid tiers. I'd expect them to be running the same code, often on the same servers, as paid tiers. Free tier accounts would for the most part just have different per account settings. If that is the case, and I was a paid tier user, I would be upset if it takes days to respond to problems on the free tier because if free tier accounts are running into problems there is a good chance paid tier accounts are also running into problems. Maybe the problem really is one that only affects free tiers--something like, say, a load balancer mistakenly thinking the servers are overloaded and dropping free tier requests to ensure that paid tiers get served. Perhaps then maybe you can make a case that it is OK to not fix it over a weekend. But even in that case there should be a prompt investigation when the free tier users start reporting problems in order to determine if it is something that will also hurt paid tier users. If that investigation finds that it won't affect paid tiers, there should then at least be a status update explaining this. Free tier users are going to be Tweeting about, posting to HN and Reddit, etc., where paid tier users are going to see it. You need to assure your paid tier users that things are fine for them and they aren't going to have their weekend messed up dealing with your outage.
  - wolco 7y ago
    A lot of times spliting the groups make sense resource-wise.
  - jakear 7y ago
    It’s common to use free tier as a canary deploy. Cloudflare, for instance, is quite public about this.
- djannzjkzxn 7y ago
  As a user of paid LastPass and many other SaaS products, for me part of the value proposition is that I’m benefiting from the QA provided by free users. I expect bugs to be fixed quickly even if I don’t personally make a bug report. I’m especially unlikely to make a report if I already saw other people publicly complaining about the bug. Since most users don’t report bugs, software companies need to behave as though bugs are more common than reported.

by sgift 7y ago

Supermancho 7y ago

> it seems to be three days for a fix, not half an hour. You are trying to conflate 2 different metrics. The first assertion, is from the time the ticket was investigated, not submitted. It might be useful to talk about expectation of service, since that's what you are getting at. 3 days (over a weekend) is reasonable for a free tier, I would think. For a paid tier, maybe it should be more immediate.

dwaite 7y ago
> 3 days (over a weekend) is reasonable for a free tier, I would think. For a paid tier, maybe it should be more immediate. This line of reasoning sounds backwards to me. It is the importance of the service that drives the needed level of reliability and people should expect there to be a cost to match that level of urgency and have guarantees that the vendor understands and will meet those needs. If LastPass expects user password management (aka consumer access to websites) to require under two 9's, they are wrong. If they can't meet a minimum level of reliability with a free tier, they should not be offering a free tier.
- zaptheimpaler 7y ago
  That's one opinion. I'm happy with free and occasionally down rather than paid and always up.
- dhhdysh2hd 7y ago
  They're obviously meeting a minimum reliability level for the free tier or else no one would be using it because they would find it too unreliable. The argument is about whether their resolution time for the free tier is acceptably fast which can be measured by how many people left the service because of this event. Paying money gets you better service is the other idea in what you quoted, it's hard to imagine why you wouldn't give people better service for paying money unless you were getting more value off them through practices such as data collection. But privacy activists hate the poor so it's pretty hard to thoroughly monetize the free tier without someone trying to start a boycott to make their world a better place.
tzs 7y ago
> 3 days (over a weekend) is reasonable for a free tier, I would think. For a paid tier, maybe it should be more immediate. For most services, I'd expect free tiers to be strict subsets of paid tiers. I'd expect them to be running the same code, often on the same servers, as paid tiers. Free tier accounts would for the most part just have different per account settings. If that is the case, and I was a paid tier user, I would be upset if it takes days to respond to problems on the free tier because if free tier accounts are running into problems there is a good chance paid tier accounts are also running into problems. Maybe the problem really is one that only affects free tiers--something like, say, a load balancer mistakenly thinking the servers are overloaded and dropping free tier requests to ensure that paid tiers get served. Perhaps then maybe you can make a case that it is OK to not fix it over a weekend. But even in that case there should be a prompt investigation when the free tier users start reporting problems in order to determine if it is something that will also hurt paid tier users. If that investigation finds that it won't affect paid tiers, there should then at least be a status update explaining this. Free tier users are going to be Tweeting about, posting to HN and Reddit, etc., where paid tier users are going to see it. You need to assure your paid tier users that things are fine for them and they aren't going to have their weekend messed up dealing with your outage.
- wolco 7y ago
  A lot of times spliting the groups make sense resource-wise.
- jakear 7y ago
  It’s common to use free tier as a canary deploy. Cloudflare, for instance, is quite public about this.
djannzjkzxn 7y ago
As a user of paid LastPass and many other SaaS products, for me part of the value proposition is that I’m benefiting from the QA provided by free users. I expect bugs to be fixed quickly even if I don’t personally make a bug report. I’m especially unlikely to make a report if I already saw other people publicly complaining about the bug. Since most users don’t report bugs, software companies need to behave as though bugs are more common than reported.