5 ms·

We did this at DigitalOcean for similar reasons, wasn't a feature that was commonly used. Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because us

by raiyu 3y ago

We did this at DigitalOcean for similar reasons, wasn't a feature that was commonly used. Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down. What Netlify is doing here is really the best approach for both parties. And typically speaking a $104k bill would be hard to get paid up regardless if the customer's typical transaction balance was $5/mo and their credit card limit wouldn't be that high. Also, that's the benefits of credit cards - that you can still issue a charge back, and credit card companies very much favor the consumer rather than the merchant.

ohnoitsahuman 3y ago
A debt is still a debt even charged back. There would be many attorneys interested in collecting a $105k debt.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Yes if a corporation says I owe them $100k I will lose sleep. Even if they don’t have my card details.
  - dwighttk 3y ago
    The secret is to bump that debt up to $100B
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      There is a trope about how much you owe and thus whose problem it is.
- safety1st 3y ago
  No, not really. Not really what attorneys do. There might be collections agencies interested in recovering the debt, but if it's some rando guy who doesn't have the money, even that is open to debate. I mean I'm not familiar with every debt collection scenario under the sun but Internet randos seem to think this is a real thing where like a cloud/hosting company sends an army of lawyers to repo some guy's house and runs him into bankruptcy because of a traffic overage. I've never seen it work that way, what happens like with most business debts, is someone at the company negotiates with the debtor to try and get as much out of them as they can, and failing that, possibly refers it to a collections agency which does the same but plays a bit more hardball. In the case here with Netlify even before it went viral they reduced the amount from $104K to $5K, no lawyers, collectors or repo men involved, and while I'd hate to be stuck with that $5K bill, I dunno, that does feel closer to the mark of something that maybe you should be on the hook for if you're responsible for 200 TB of bandwidth overage over 4 days? Is this so bad on the part of Netlify? All that said I'll just add that I've never given my credit card to any sort of host/cloud who had terms where they could bill unlimited overage fees like this. Never will unless there's a cap. Not Netlify not AWS not nobody. That goes for my personal life as well as for the business I operate. The terms is the terms and the answer is to not use these services unless you can afford them imho.
  - coryrc 3y ago
    Traffic doesn't cost money. Bandwidth costs money. Unused bandwidth doesn't cost less than used bandwidth. So, no, you shouldn't pay so much for something that doesn't cost them any money?
    - dboreham 3y ago
      > Traffic doesn't cost money. Mostly false. Either transit is billed on a 95th%ile basis (so...more money for more traffic), or if it is flat/netted, you're still paying for the capex for the switch ports (fatter connection to support more traffic means more $$$ for the gear to support it).
      - jrockway 3y ago
        What switch port costs $105,000 a month?
      - coryrc 3y ago
        At Netlify scale, it'll be the latter. And the appropriate thing to do with free-tier traffic is set lower QoS so it doesn't interfere with paid traffic. This, it doesn't have cost. You can say "the sum total of free-tier traffic requires X additional connections" but the sudden burst of DoS traffic did not raise marginal costs (besides an inconsequential usage of electricity).
  - nickjj 3y ago
    > I'd hate to be stuck with that $5K bill, I dunno, that does feel closer to the mark of something that maybe you should be on the hook for if you're responsible for 200 TB of bandwidth overage over 4 days? The responsibility part is the tricky part of the equation. If someone hits your site with a DDoS attack, are you responsible? There's literally nothing[0] you can do as a customer of a cloud provider here because anything you can do is limited to the servers and services you're given access to. For example even if I had access to billions of requests and built an anti-DDoS tool it would still need to run within the cloud provider's provisioned server which means I'd be on the hook for all traffic costs because it's something running in my account. That doesn't seem reasonable to me as a customer. It means a cloud hosting provider can put an extreme financial burden on a customer and make a killing in profits because of the markup they charge on bandwidth. The incentives are terribly misaligned. [0]: I mean you can sign up for DDoS protection through a 3rd party company but in this case I'm talking about taking actions within your hosting provider.
noir_lord 3y ago
> Also, that's the benefits of credit cards - that you can still issue a charge back, and credit card companies very much favor the consumer rather than the merchant. So your suggestion is to issue a chargeback.. to get money back that should under the terms of whatever service you signed up for be owed?. That seems like bordering on fraud tbh. > Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down. Legit concern and something I mentioned, I'm gonna guess there are broad two camps on that one - mine which is "I want a safety ripcord" and "whee, nice problem to have". However since this entire conversation is around a guy who got a massive invoice because of a bill he wasn't expecting and couldn't have set such a limit I'm still gonna go with a "I want a way to constrain the financial downside - hell turn it off by default but give me the option". Since broadly a lot of cloud stuff doesn't, I'll constrain it a different way.
- kuboble 3y ago
  So is the solution to have two thresholds? Notify me urgently if the traffic exceeds 100$, giving me a chance to evaluate what's going on but shut it down at 1000$ if I don't act.
- mattferderer 3y ago
  > So your suggestion is to issue a chargeback.. to get money back that should under the terms of whatever service you signed up for be owed?. Funny story... One of the big cloud providers actually has you do that on purpose as a remedy for an account you've lost access to.
ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
Here's an idea: let users set a spending limit. If they're about to go over, shoot them a quick heads-up and give them 24 hours to sort things out or level up their package. After that, if they haven't made any changes, temporarily pause their site access
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  AWS budgets are good for the first part, but they have no interest in a hard cap for obvious reasons.
  - gazelle21 3y ago
    Im out of the loop, what obvious reasons?
    - dns_snek 3y ago
      They profit when their customers can't hard limit their spend and end up racking up large bills by accident, or for reasons outside of their control. By the way, your comment was flagged which seemed odd, so I looked at your profile and it seems like all of your comments are being (automatically?) flagged and don't appear on HN by default. You might want to talk to the HN staff about that.
      - nemothekid 3y ago
        1. This doesn't seem like a rational thing to do. A trillion dollar business built on people making mistakes and actually running up a bill? Which exec is getting a bonus when little Johnny gets hit with a $1000 charge on his CS101 project? Doesn't seem likely. 2. To me, it's more likely they don't have one because there are edge cases to consider that make "hard limits" difficult to implement. What is AWS supposed to do when you hit the limit? Is it a hard limit? Ok, so when I hit my budget, all my s3 buckets get deleted and all my EBS drives get dropped? Do all my code deployments just get deleted? Do you "bless" certain services so that they continue to charge the user even after the hard limit? How is all of this communicated? You can set an alarm in AWS today and the user can decide what to shut off. If you really need to, you can create a script that can hard nuke your account once a limit is reached; but I don't see why AWS should nuke your account for you.
aurareturn 3y ago
Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down. But that's on the user. The user shouldn't get upset in that scenario and has no right to. You're giving the control back to the user.
- typon 3y ago
  The infantilization of the user is common in tech now. For good reasons? Maybe. But it is common.
  - pierat 3y ago
    The site user/admin saying "If this spend goes over $100, shut shit down" is called being a fiscally responsible adult. The fact that most cloud operators don't have actual hard cutoffs to maintain financial responsibility is intentional. Azure does, but only for specific account types. If it's PAYG, you can't do it. The end result is if you do something "weird", or someone DDoS's you, you're liable. With a hard limit, a DDoS just takes your site offline.
- gwright 3y ago
  > But that's on the user. The user shouldn't get upset in that scenario and has no right to. I agree. I also agree that when dealing with large numbers of people, there will be people who don't understand this and/or will actively try to social engineer their way out of their own decisions. Setting customer expectations and meeting them successfully isn't easy.
- conductr 3y ago
  How about just fix the pricing formula to account for massive surges. Instead of forcing user to set a low cost limit and missing a viral opportunity or the platform writing off the massive bill the customer can't afford... just put the billing mode into a reduced price mode or have some more nuanced configurations. Sometimes is just asking the question the right way. Instead of "max spend limit" or similar "If your site goes viral, how many requests do you want to serve before going offline? 1M=$20, 10M=$100, etc" at this point, I feel like bandwidth consumption is a bad metric for billing; just use requests/visits/actions and price for those. This is not prescriptive just illustrative. The point is make a better pricing formula to account for these massively unexpected events. Couple it with an aggressive notification policy when this traffic event gets triggered. The user should know the traffic pattern has changed and a high traffic event is happening. They can login and change the configs and decide if they want to keep it going or not.
charcircuit 3y ago
>that you can still issue a charge back Most users don't want to be banned from their hosting provider.
nico 3y ago
> usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down Of course. And that’s why any limit against a dynamic variable should also have alerts linked to it Send an alert to the user when traffic starts spiking, especially if a simple projection shows it’s going to go over their limit Then the user is aware, hopefully with enough time to lift the limit if needed
- ygjb 3y ago
  That's a level of responsiveness that doesn't exist for the vast majority of organizations. If your customer is aware enough to notice they are being hit with a DOS or legit traffic while it is happening, then great! They can respond, and if needed, engage proserve to get support for scaling or defense depending on needs. If your customer is not alert enough, then their site is offline, and they won't hear about it until their customers are screaming at them, which will result in a P1 ticket to look at a vendor who won't turn them off during an unexpected peak. It's a catch 22, and if you have to choose between: a) a PR hit because you have to go on a forum and post about waiving the fee, or b) a PR hit because someone posted a blog post about how you killed their site during a moment of critical growth any reasonable business will choose A every time because A is far more supportive of customer growth and has drastically better optics. Anyone who thinks A is worse is probably too inexperienced to have an opinion.
  - dns_snek 3y ago
    > Anyone who thinks A is worse is probably too inexperienced to have an opinion. I'd say the same about those who only think in absolutes. That's a false dilemma. You can give your customers a choice in these matters with an optional hard limit, which I realize seems like a rather extreme idea these days. Someone running a personal project will likely opt to have a low hard limit, say $10, while businesses will more likely opt in for alerts without, or with very high hard limits.
hex4def6 3y ago
It seems like that could be an option like: Hard limit: [$1000]/mth or [$500]/24hr period Notify me if traffic exceeds thresholds: [$800+]/mth or [$400]/24 hr period Notify me if the traffic forecast for the month looks like it will exceed my hard limit before the end of the month.
jedberg 3y ago
> Also, that's the benefits of credit cards - that you can still issue a charge back, and credit card companies very much favor the consumer rather than the merchant. That has not been my experience. I've had to do a few chargebacks for services not rendered, and I've never won. I will submit my evidence, then the vendor will submit 100 pages of random emails, and then I will have my claim denied. Then I will appeal, will point out that they sent 100 random pages of email, and then they will reply with the same 100 pages of emails and I'll get denied again. It seems that the vendors have found the hack for chargebacks -- just inundate the credit card company with so much data that they assume the vendor must be right. It makes sense -- the vendors pay the credit card companies a lot more than I do. They'd rather keep them happy than me.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  That's strange. I think I've done about 10 chargebacks over 35 years. All but one I "won" with just an initial submission and waiting. One my card company came back to me for additional details before also siding with me.
- jokethrowaway 3y ago
  As a seller I have the opposite experience. Plenty of morons just use the service and chargeback right before renewal so they got the service for free, some just chargeback instead of cancelling their plan or asking a refund. I get hit with 15$ bill plus I lose all the money even if I provided the service. Whatever email / data from my system I send is ignored and the scammer / moron gets his money back. I'm sure that's how it works if the vendor is large enough. If you are a small fish you don't stand a chance, which is why for my next project (where I'm supposed to charge a lot and spend a lot on behalf of the user - and I'll be royally screwed if I start getting chargebacks on 500$ of which I've already spent 450$) I'll just accept crypto payments.
benterix 3y ago
Just want to chime in: 1) Thank you for allowing us to set the limit. 2) I understand your opinion that you prefer chargebacks but I disagree with it. The very reason I stay with Hetzner is that I know in advance what my bills will be for the whole year. Heck, I even charge my account in advance so that I don't worry about any charges!
patmorgan23 3y ago
They still need to make tweaks to avoid sending $100k bills to people who signed up to a free service. Like let them go over one month and then make them sign up for a paid plan for the next.
Gormo 3y ago
> What Netlify is doing here is really the best approach for both parties. Sort of, but the approach to the approach isn't great. If you're going to void charges from DDOS traffic anyway, you might as well make that explicit policy, rather than doing it after the fact in a way that seems discretionary. The Reddit thread is full of people who are saying that they intend to pull their static content off of Netlify and move it to Cloudflare Pages, which has no overages on the free tier in the first place. I can tell you that I personally chose Cloudflare Pages to set up a new static site a couple of weeks ago, and Netlify wasn't even in the running. If Netlify's free tier is important to their customer acquisition strategy, then they really need to retool how they're offering it, or Cloudflare is going to eat their lunch.
- joshjob42 3y ago
  Just deleted my tiny personal site, and will reinstate it at Cloudflare Pages. Thanks for the tip!
brnt 3y ago
That sort of adversarial weaponization of credit cards is really a US thing. In most of the world, payment is not relevant to the question of liability: you create a debt, whether or not you can debit a card. So, looks like DigitalOcean is another name to avoid. Also: what's common? At the scale these companies so desire, small percentages are still thousands of users. Supporting them with what's ultimately a fairly trivial option shouldn't be seen as such a hassle.
- croemer 3y ago
  Partially agree, yes the liability is independent of the payment. But in practice the one who has the money has the benefit of the status quo. The other party without money has to actively take legal action which is costly enough that it's often not pursued.
  - brnt 3y ago
    That again depends on jurisdiction. In much of the EU, this is not expensive and a thriving industry exists to support businesses to get bills paid.
    - croemer 3y ago
      Yes and no, collection costs significant proportions of the outstanding debt, and if you object to the collection of the debt saying it's not justified the business ultimately has to sue. Collector can't do everything.

by raiyu 3y ago

ohnoitsahuman 3y ago

A debt is still a debt even charged back. There would be many attorneys interested in collecting a $105k debt.

quickthrower2 3y ago
Yes if a corporation says I owe them $100k I will lose sleep. Even if they don’t have my card details.
- dwighttk 3y ago
  The secret is to bump that debt up to $100B
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    There is a trope about how much you owe and thus whose problem it is.
safety1st 3y ago
No, not really. Not really what attorneys do. There might be collections agencies interested in recovering the debt, but if it's some rando guy who doesn't have the money, even that is open to debate. I mean I'm not familiar with every debt collection scenario under the sun but Internet randos seem to think this is a real thing where like a cloud/hosting company sends an army of lawyers to repo some guy's house and runs him into bankruptcy because of a traffic overage. I've never seen it work that way, what happens like with most business debts, is someone at the company negotiates with the debtor to try and get as much out of them as they can, and failing that, possibly refers it to a collections agency which does the same but plays a bit more hardball. In the case here with Netlify even before it went viral they reduced the amount from $104K to $5K, no lawyers, collectors or repo men involved, and while I'd hate to be stuck with that $5K bill, I dunno, that does feel closer to the mark of something that maybe you should be on the hook for if you're responsible for 200 TB of bandwidth overage over 4 days? Is this so bad on the part of Netlify? All that said I'll just add that I've never given my credit card to any sort of host/cloud who had terms where they could bill unlimited overage fees like this. Never will unless there's a cap. Not Netlify not AWS not nobody. That goes for my personal life as well as for the business I operate. The terms is the terms and the answer is to not use these services unless you can afford them imho.
- coryrc 3y ago
  Traffic doesn't cost money. Bandwidth costs money. Unused bandwidth doesn't cost less than used bandwidth. So, no, you shouldn't pay so much for something that doesn't cost them any money?
  - dboreham 3y ago
    > Traffic doesn't cost money. Mostly false. Either transit is billed on a 95th%ile basis (so...more money for more traffic), or if it is flat/netted, you're still paying for the capex for the switch ports (fatter connection to support more traffic means more $$$ for the gear to support it).
    - jrockway 3y ago
      What switch port costs $105,000 a month?
    - coryrc 3y ago
      At Netlify scale, it'll be the latter. And the appropriate thing to do with free-tier traffic is set lower QoS so it doesn't interfere with paid traffic. This, it doesn't have cost. You can say "the sum total of free-tier traffic requires X additional connections" but the sudden burst of DoS traffic did not raise marginal costs (besides an inconsequential usage of electricity).
- nickjj 3y ago
  > I'd hate to be stuck with that $5K bill, I dunno, that does feel closer to the mark of something that maybe you should be on the hook for if you're responsible for 200 TB of bandwidth overage over 4 days? The responsibility part is the tricky part of the equation. If someone hits your site with a DDoS attack, are you responsible? There's literally nothing[0] you can do as a customer of a cloud provider here because anything you can do is limited to the servers and services you're given access to. For example even if I had access to billions of requests and built an anti-DDoS tool it would still need to run within the cloud provider's provisioned server which means I'd be on the hook for all traffic costs because it's something running in my account. That doesn't seem reasonable to me as a customer. It means a cloud hosting provider can put an extreme financial burden on a customer and make a killing in profits because of the markup they charge on bandwidth. The incentives are terribly misaligned. [0]: I mean you can sign up for DDoS protection through a 3rd party company but in this case I'm talking about taking actions within your hosting provider.

noir_lord 3y ago

> Also, that's the benefits of credit cards - that you can still issue a charge back, and credit card companies very much favor the consumer rather than the merchant. So your suggestion is to issue a chargeback.. to get money back that should under the terms of whatever service you signed up for be owed?. That seems like bordering on fraud tbh. > Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down. Legit concern and something I mentioned, I'm gonna guess there are broad two camps on that one - mine which is "I want a safety ripcord" and "whee, nice problem to have". However since this entire conversation is around a guy who got a massive invoice because of a bill he wasn't expecting and couldn't have set such a limit I'm still gonna go with a "I want a way to constrain the financial downside - hell turn it off by default but give me the option". Since broadly a lot of cloud stuff doesn't, I'll constrain it a different way.

kuboble 3y ago
So is the solution to have two thresholds? Notify me urgently if the traffic exceeds 100$, giving me a chance to evaluate what's going on but shut it down at 1000$ if I don't act.
mattferderer 3y ago
> So your suggestion is to issue a chargeback.. to get money back that should under the terms of whatever service you signed up for be owed?. Funny story... One of the big cloud providers actually has you do that on purpose as a remedy for an account you've lost access to.

ahmedfromtunis 3y ago

Here's an idea: let users set a spending limit. If they're about to go over, shoot them a quick heads-up and give them 24 hours to sort things out or level up their package. After that, if they haven't made any changes, temporarily pause their site access

skeeter2020 3y ago
AWS budgets are good for the first part, but they have no interest in a hard cap for obvious reasons.
- gazelle21 3y ago
  Im out of the loop, what obvious reasons?
  - dns_snek 3y ago
    They profit when their customers can't hard limit their spend and end up racking up large bills by accident, or for reasons outside of their control. By the way, your comment was flagged which seemed odd, so I looked at your profile and it seems like all of your comments are being (automatically?) flagged and don't appear on HN by default. You might want to talk to the HN staff about that.
    - nemothekid 3y ago
      1. This doesn't seem like a rational thing to do. A trillion dollar business built on people making mistakes and actually running up a bill? Which exec is getting a bonus when little Johnny gets hit with a $1000 charge on his CS101 project? Doesn't seem likely. 2. To me, it's more likely they don't have one because there are edge cases to consider that make "hard limits" difficult to implement. What is AWS supposed to do when you hit the limit? Is it a hard limit? Ok, so when I hit my budget, all my s3 buckets get deleted and all my EBS drives get dropped? Do all my code deployments just get deleted? Do you "bless" certain services so that they continue to charge the user even after the hard limit? How is all of this communicated? You can set an alarm in AWS today and the user can decide what to shut off. If you really need to, you can create a script that can hard nuke your account once a limit is reached; but I don't see why AWS should nuke your account for you.

aurareturn 3y ago

Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down. But that's on the user. The user shouldn't get upset in that scenario and has no right to. You're giving the control back to the user.

typon 3y ago
The infantilization of the user is common in tech now. For good reasons? Maybe. But it is common.
- pierat 3y ago
  The site user/admin saying "If this spend goes over $100, shut shit down" is called being a fiscally responsible adult. The fact that most cloud operators don't have actual hard cutoffs to maintain financial responsibility is intentional. Azure does, but only for specific account types. If it's PAYG, you can't do it. The end result is if you do something "weird", or someone DDoS's you, you're liable. With a hard limit, a DDoS just takes your site offline.
gwright 3y ago
> But that's on the user. The user shouldn't get upset in that scenario and has no right to. I agree. I also agree that when dealing with large numbers of people, there will be people who don't understand this and/or will actively try to social engineer their way out of their own decisions. Setting customer expectations and meeting them successfully isn't easy.
conductr 3y ago
How about just fix the pricing formula to account for massive surges. Instead of forcing user to set a low cost limit and missing a viral opportunity or the platform writing off the massive bill the customer can't afford... just put the billing mode into a reduced price mode or have some more nuanced configurations. Sometimes is just asking the question the right way. Instead of "max spend limit" or similar "If your site goes viral, how many requests do you want to serve before going offline? 1M=$20, 10M=$100, etc" at this point, I feel like bandwidth consumption is a bad metric for billing; just use requests/visits/actions and price for those. This is not prescriptive just illustrative. The point is make a better pricing formula to account for these massively unexpected events. Couple it with an aggressive notification policy when this traffic event gets triggered. The user should know the traffic pattern has changed and a high traffic event is happening. They can login and change the configs and decide if they want to keep it going or not.

charcircuit 3y ago

>that you can still issue a charge back Most users don't want to be banned from their hosting provider.

nico 3y ago

> usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down Of course. And that’s why any limit against a dynamic variable should also have alerts linked to it Send an alert to the user when traffic starts spiking, especially if a simple projection shows it’s going to go over their limit Then the user is aware, hopefully with enough time to lift the limit if needed

ygjb 3y ago
That's a level of responsiveness that doesn't exist for the vast majority of organizations. If your customer is aware enough to notice they are being hit with a DOS or legit traffic while it is happening, then great! They can respond, and if needed, engage proserve to get support for scaling or defense depending on needs. If your customer is not alert enough, then their site is offline, and they won't hear about it until their customers are screaming at them, which will result in a P1 ticket to look at a vendor who won't turn them off during an unexpected peak. It's a catch 22, and if you have to choose between: a) a PR hit because you have to go on a forum and post about waiving the fee, or b) a PR hit because someone posted a blog post about how you killed their site during a moment of critical growth any reasonable business will choose A every time because A is far more supportive of customer growth and has drastically better optics. Anyone who thinks A is worse is probably too inexperienced to have an opinion.
- dns_snek 3y ago
  > Anyone who thinks A is worse is probably too inexperienced to have an opinion. I'd say the same about those who only think in absolutes. That's a false dilemma. You can give your customers a choice in these matters with an optional hard limit, which I realize seems like a rather extreme idea these days. Someone running a personal project will likely opt to have a low hard limit, say $10, while businesses will more likely opt in for alerts without, or with very high hard limits.

hex4def6 3y ago

It seems like that could be an option like: Hard limit: [$1000]/mth or [$500]/24hr period Notify me if traffic exceeds thresholds: [$800+]/mth or [$400]/24 hr period Notify me if the traffic forecast for the month looks like it will exceed my hard limit before the end of the month.

jedberg 3y ago

> Also, that's the benefits of credit cards - that you can still issue a charge back, and credit card companies very much favor the consumer rather than the merchant. That has not been my experience. I've had to do a few chargebacks for services not rendered, and I've never won. I will submit my evidence, then the vendor will submit 100 pages of random emails, and then I will have my claim denied. Then I will appeal, will point out that they sent 100 random pages of email, and then they will reply with the same 100 pages of emails and I'll get denied again. It seems that the vendors have found the hack for chargebacks -- just inundate the credit card company with so much data that they assume the vendor must be right. It makes sense -- the vendors pay the credit card companies a lot more than I do. They'd rather keep them happy than me.

sokoloff 3y ago
That's strange. I think I've done about 10 chargebacks over 35 years. All but one I "won" with just an initial submission and waiting. One my card company came back to me for additional details before also siding with me.
jokethrowaway 3y ago
As a seller I have the opposite experience. Plenty of morons just use the service and chargeback right before renewal so they got the service for free, some just chargeback instead of cancelling their plan or asking a refund. I get hit with 15$ bill plus I lose all the money even if I provided the service. Whatever email / data from my system I send is ignored and the scammer / moron gets his money back. I'm sure that's how it works if the vendor is large enough. If you are a small fish you don't stand a chance, which is why for my next project (where I'm supposed to charge a lot and spend a lot on behalf of the user - and I'll be royally screwed if I start getting chargebacks on 500$ of which I've already spent 450$) I'll just accept crypto payments.

benterix 3y ago

Just want to chime in: 1) Thank you for allowing us to set the limit. 2) I understand your opinion that you prefer chargebacks but I disagree with it. The very reason I stay with Hetzner is that I know in advance what my bills will be for the whole year. Heck, I even charge my account in advance so that I don't worry about any charges!

patmorgan23 3y ago

They still need to make tweaks to avoid sending $100k bills to people who signed up to a free service. Like let them go over one month and then make them sign up for a paid plan for the next.

Gormo 3y ago

> What Netlify is doing here is really the best approach for both parties. Sort of, but the approach to the approach isn't great. If you're going to void charges from DDOS traffic anyway, you might as well make that explicit policy, rather than doing it after the fact in a way that seems discretionary. The Reddit thread is full of people who are saying that they intend to pull their static content off of Netlify and move it to Cloudflare Pages, which has no overages on the free tier in the first place. I can tell you that I personally chose Cloudflare Pages to set up a new static site a couple of weeks ago, and Netlify wasn't even in the running. If Netlify's free tier is important to their customer acquisition strategy, then they really need to retool how they're offering it, or Cloudflare is going to eat their lunch.

joshjob42 3y ago
Just deleted my tiny personal site, and will reinstate it at Cloudflare Pages. Thanks for the tip!

brnt 3y ago

That sort of adversarial weaponization of credit cards is really a US thing. In most of the world, payment is not relevant to the question of liability: you create a debt, whether or not you can debit a card. So, looks like DigitalOcean is another name to avoid. Also: what's common? At the scale these companies so desire, small percentages are still thousands of users. Supporting them with what's ultimately a fairly trivial option shouldn't be seen as such a hassle.

croemer 3y ago
Partially agree, yes the liability is independent of the payment. But in practice the one who has the money has the benefit of the status quo. The other party without money has to actively take legal action which is costly enough that it's often not pursued.
- brnt 3y ago
  That again depends on jurisdiction. In much of the EU, this is not expensive and a thriving industry exists to support businesses to get bills paid.
  - croemer 3y ago
    Yes and no, collection costs significant proportions of the outstanding debt, and if you object to the collection of the debt saying it's not justified the business ultimately has to sue. Collector can't do everything.