5 ms·

Lol this deescalated pretty quickly, went from $104K to $20K to $5K to $0 Which basically means you almost scammed the customer for $5K or $20K. Super negative

by altin0 3y ago

Lol this deescalated pretty quickly, went from $104K to $20K to $5K to $0 Which basically means you almost scammed the customer for $5K or $20K. Super negative practices. I for one could never trust a company operating in that manner. It would be much more honest to say "unlimited bandwidth" and set a hard-limit for maximum budget, then people know they won't be charged, than to go through all this crap and then pretend you're doing a favor to the customer (you're not). If I'm normally spending $10/month any idiot out there would know for sure that I'm not going to spend $104K instantly. That's a very basic filter to have. But you don't place such filters because obviously you're working on the principle to scam people many thousands of $ if they fall for that. Heck, for all we know you might send that amount of traffic to your customer and the try to scam them and if it doesn't work then pretend you're doing them a favor.

hasty_pudding 3y ago
The fact that the CEO had to step in after this blew up online otherwise they were going to try to extort that poor dude for thousands of dollars! Moving my sites off of netlify ASAP.
- BigJono 3y ago
  Tell you what is a good question, why is this thread on page FIVE of HN (ranked #125) with 1000+ upvotes, 400+ comments and only 7 hours old?
  - croemer 3y ago
    I asked this question as "Ask HN" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39524660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39524660
  - sergiotapia 3y ago
    I found out about this from twitter - weird how it's so buried on HN.
  - dang 3y ago
    This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. See "How are stories ranked?" and "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?" About this specific case: it set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector) and also got moderation downweights. We sometimes turn off that penalty, but I don't think we'd do so in a case like this, because HN gets so many posts of this nature. They flare up with Big Drama that is sensational for a while but not particularly interesting, and therefore not really what the site is for. In fact HN gets so many posts of this type that it has become a joke, and not only that but a cliché, so much so that the top comment of the Reddit thread repeats it [1]. That's about as repetitive as anything gets. The basic idea of HN is to gratify intellectual curiosity [2] and avoid repetition [3]. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1b14bty/netlify_just_sent_me_a_104k_bill_for_a_simple/ksc6txu/ https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1b14bty/netlify_jus... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
    - BigJono 3y ago
      I don't really buy that to be honest. I read this whole thread before the CEO posted and after, and neither time thought any of the comments were out of line or even that the general mood was any more heated than any other random HN thread. People are politely asking pertinent questions. And I think once the CEO makes a statement which contradicts the company's support response, that becomes very interesting. Particularly to anybody that uses their service. I'm certainly not finding the conversation very repetetive or cliche.
      - dang 3y ago
        You're welcome to disagree, of course. My main concern is to explain what the principles are. I'm not saying we apply them perfectly—sometimes we make bad calls. I can tell you pretty much for certain though, that we'd hear many more complaints if a Reddit thread about a customer support shitstorm stayed on HN's front page for very long. Btw, the Customer Support Fuckup category is one of several $X where HN has become known as the place for $X, but only because HN is not actually for $X. Another example is the Site Is Down category—people often come to HN to find out what's going on when some $Site or other is having an outage. But just as HN itself isn't a site monitoring platform, it's also not a customer-support-of-last-resort platform. If the community feels like this customer support fuckup is altogether more interesting, I'd consider reversing the call, but again, my gut feeling is that we'd get even more complaints that way.
canyonero 3y ago
This is very weird take. I'm struggling to understand why this is incident as a reflection of "super negative practices" or is somehow a "scam". The CEO came here and publicly apologized for the mistake and mis-communication, and the issue is resolved for the user with no charges. What am I missing?
- herbst 3y ago
  What price would the dude have to pay if he didn't publish it? How often does this happen and why is there no protection against charging free customers 100k out of the blue. Why charge it and shock the customer if practice is to waive it? The CEOs response kinda just made the situation worse.
  - canyonero 3y ago
    Yeah, I don't buy this conspiracy theory. The reason why they charge it could be as simple as they calculated the bandwidth usage following a ddos attack. It amounted to 104k worth of bandwidth usage. There system is not sophisticated enough to recognize it was a mistake due to attack on their site. Thus a manual intervention was needed, and now it's resolved.
    - Hot_Garbage 3y ago
      Right, but there's still a huge contradiction here. The support email says it's standard practice to charge 20%. Now the CEO's comment says it's standard practice to waive it entirely. So which one is true?
- altin0 3y ago
  It's only a weird take if you don't have any common sense. It's super simple: either offer unlimited bandwidth(since you're not charging these anyways), like Cloudflare Pages does, or put in place controls that will allow customer to set a top limit for their budget. You can't just all of a sudden send them a $104K bill and expect them to pay when the've never spent more than a few bucks. And then even worse, you can't pretend to expect them to pay 20%, then 5% then pretend you're doing them a favor by completely liftig it off. That's just arbitrary billing and preying for any victim that would fall and agree to pay 20% or 5% etc. I'm just asking for common sense and practices that build trust, not arbitraty billing rules.
chatmasta 3y ago
Heck, at that point, why not "send some traffic" to your customer? It's not like they have any way of verifying its source. Hmm... why even send traffic at all? Just add a multiplier to their metrics!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by altin0 3y ago

hasty_pudding 3y ago

The fact that the CEO had to step in after this blew up online otherwise they were going to try to extort that poor dude for thousands of dollars! Moving my sites off of netlify ASAP.

BigJono 3y ago
Tell you what is a good question, why is this thread on page FIVE of HN (ranked #125) with 1000+ upvotes, 400+ comments and only 7 hours old?
- croemer 3y ago
  I asked this question as "Ask HN" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39524660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39524660
- sergiotapia 3y ago
  I found out about this from twitter - weird how it's so buried on HN.
- dang 3y ago
  This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. See "How are stories ranked?" and "Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?" About this specific case: it set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector) and also got moderation downweights. We sometimes turn off that penalty, but I don't think we'd do so in a case like this, because HN gets so many posts of this nature. They flare up with Big Drama that is sensational for a while but not particularly interesting, and therefore not really what the site is for. In fact HN gets so many posts of this type that it has become a joke, and not only that but a cliché, so much so that the top comment of the Reddit thread repeats it [1]. That's about as repetitive as anything gets. The basic idea of HN is to gratify intellectual curiosity [2] and avoid repetition [3]. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1b14bty/netlify_just_sent_me_a_104k_bill_for_a_simple/ksc6txu/ https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1b14bty/netlify_jus... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
  - BigJono 3y ago
    I don't really buy that to be honest. I read this whole thread before the CEO posted and after, and neither time thought any of the comments were out of line or even that the general mood was any more heated than any other random HN thread. People are politely asking pertinent questions. And I think once the CEO makes a statement which contradicts the company's support response, that becomes very interesting. Particularly to anybody that uses their service. I'm certainly not finding the conversation very repetetive or cliche.
    - dang 3y ago
      You're welcome to disagree, of course. My main concern is to explain what the principles are. I'm not saying we apply them perfectly—sometimes we make bad calls. I can tell you pretty much for certain though, that we'd hear many more complaints if a Reddit thread about a customer support shitstorm stayed on HN's front page for very long. Btw, the Customer Support Fuckup category is one of several $X where HN has become known as the place for $X, but only because HN is not actually for $X. Another example is the Site Is Down category—people often come to HN to find out what's going on when some $Site or other is having an outage. But just as HN itself isn't a site monitoring platform, it's also not a customer-support-of-last-resort platform. If the community feels like this customer support fuckup is altogether more interesting, I'd consider reversing the call, but again, my gut feeling is that we'd get even more complaints that way.

canyonero 3y ago

This is very weird take. I'm struggling to understand why this is incident as a reflection of "super negative practices" or is somehow a "scam". The CEO came here and publicly apologized for the mistake and mis-communication, and the issue is resolved for the user with no charges. What am I missing?

herbst 3y ago
What price would the dude have to pay if he didn't publish it? How often does this happen and why is there no protection against charging free customers 100k out of the blue. Why charge it and shock the customer if practice is to waive it? The CEOs response kinda just made the situation worse.
- canyonero 3y ago
  Yeah, I don't buy this conspiracy theory. The reason why they charge it could be as simple as they calculated the bandwidth usage following a ddos attack. It amounted to 104k worth of bandwidth usage. There system is not sophisticated enough to recognize it was a mistake due to attack on their site. Thus a manual intervention was needed, and now it's resolved.
  - Hot_Garbage 3y ago
    Right, but there's still a huge contradiction here. The support email says it's standard practice to charge 20%. Now the CEO's comment says it's standard practice to waive it entirely. So which one is true?
altin0 3y ago
It's only a weird take if you don't have any common sense. It's super simple: either offer unlimited bandwidth(since you're not charging these anyways), like Cloudflare Pages does, or put in place controls that will allow customer to set a top limit for their budget. You can't just all of a sudden send them a $104K bill and expect them to pay when the've never spent more than a few bucks. And then even worse, you can't pretend to expect them to pay 20%, then 5% then pretend you're doing them a favor by completely liftig it off. That's just arbitrary billing and preying for any victim that would fall and agree to pay 20% or 5% etc. I'm just asking for common sense and practices that build trust, not arbitraty billing rules.

chatmasta 3y ago

Heck, at that point, why not "send some traffic" to your customer? It's not like they have any way of verifying its source. Hmm... why even send traffic at all? Just add a multiplier to their metrics!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]