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There’s a reason that services like AWS and GCP tend to be fairly forgiving of billing due to legitimate mistakes by first-time users (and others). And that re

There’s a reason that services like AWS and GCP tend to be fairly forgiving of billing due to legitimate mistakes by first-time users (and others). And that reason is perfectly summarized by this post: anyone reading this post is likely to put Vercel on a mental do-not-use list. This is also the reason that cloud providers tend to have default quotas that, among other things, limit runaway usage. Admittedly without knowing much about it, it sounds like Vercel may be pretty immature as a business. Edit: after commenting I saw the Vercel response. I’m leaving my comment up because that response still seems to focus on a refund being conditional on some technical justification. That’s how engineers tend to think. It’s not how successful businesspeople need to think. It seems like both the refund policy and quota/limit management may need to be reviewed.

junofan 4y ago
Yeah not worth the risk.
- benatkin 4y ago
  They also charge more, sometimes around double, for domains, like .studio is the nice even price of $50/yr on Vercel but it's some odd cheaper price like $26 on Namecheap. And it's not like that part of it's better, they still have to pass on weirdness from registrars. I tried registering .md and that was failing. Probably not on their end but they didn't do anything extra like warn me it could happen or provide a helpful error message. (I got excited about Zeit when it was going to be similar to Google Cloud Run or fly.io and am less interested in serverless that means things like database bouncers or using old versions of Node.js)
CJefferson 4y ago
I hear this claim that AWS is forgiving of legitimate mistakes, but I don't think it's true. It's true if you have friends in Amazon, or you manage to appear on ycombinator or have a few thousand twitter followers. I've known at least three students end up with bills of around $100, which to them are huge, and which weren't waved.
- antonvs 4y ago
  The problem there is if you can’t afford $100, then under no circumstances should you consider using AWS or any major cloud provider. They simply don’t cater to that market.
- lozenge 4y ago
  The cost of responding to waive requests if $100 could be waived would be huge. We're talking about $10k and up.

junofan 4y ago

Yeah not worth the risk.

benatkin 4y ago
They also charge more, sometimes around double, for domains, like .studio is the nice even price of $50/yr on Vercel but it's some odd cheaper price like $26 on Namecheap. And it's not like that part of it's better, they still have to pass on weirdness from registrars. I tried registering .md and that was failing. Probably not on their end but they didn't do anything extra like warn me it could happen or provide a helpful error message. (I got excited about Zeit when it was going to be similar to Google Cloud Run or fly.io and am less interested in serverless that means things like database bouncers or using old versions of Node.js)

CJefferson 4y ago

I hear this claim that AWS is forgiving of legitimate mistakes, but I don't think it's true. It's true if you have friends in Amazon, or you manage to appear on ycombinator or have a few thousand twitter followers. I've known at least three students end up with bills of around $100, which to them are huge, and which weren't waved.

antonvs 4y ago
The problem there is if you can’t afford $100, then under no circumstances should you consider using AWS or any major cloud provider. They simply don’t cater to that market.
lozenge 4y ago
The cost of responding to waive requests if $100 could be waived would be huge. We're talking about $10k and up.