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protocolture 4 hours ago [-]
Years ago I got my first internet enabled mobile, and the carrier advertised it as having "300 free minutes" as part of the trial period, which is great. So I used 297 minutes of internet services in the first month, but aha actually the minutes only referred to telephony, and I was stung with a ~12,000 dollar overdue mobile internet invoice (360 dollars per megabyte or something equally ludicrous)
They got done in by a massive class action, that I was tangentially a beneficiary of, not because of the minutes claim, which was standard practice, but because they had failed to provide anyone with the cost of the data.
I think I paid them 300 bucks or something in the end. After further letting a 600 dollar agreement go to collections and settling with collections for 50%.
ErigmolCt 2 hours ago [-]
This is why I'm pretty sympathetic to hard caps by default
Terr_ 1 hours ago [-]
That makes me think of bank overdraft fees.
They are another kind of "soft" cap, pitched as an automatic convenience to the customer... But in practice they are too-often deceptive and harmful.
Data was counted as minutes back then for you? I only remember kB and MB costs...
tialaramex 9 minutes ago [-]
Last century most people were only sometimes using the Internet. They'd "Go online", if you're young enough not to recognise that noise in Blue Prince when you use the network, that's a "Dial up modem" which is how a typical person would "Go online" in the mid-1990s. So in this regime counting minutes makes some sense.
I got a preview of the modern world from about 1996 because my first shared student house (shout out to any Hitchers reading) had a single dial-up modem set to always connect to a free-to-use University modem and then used IP Masquerading (the ancestor of today's NATs) so that all of our computers could share this tiny connection.
So by the time of my 21st birthday, I was "always on" in the same sense that you'd always be today, except with much, much lower bandwidth and what I can tell you is that this, not the bandwidth is what makes the difference.
When you're "always on" the reflexive answer to "Wait, where do Porcupines live?" is to look online. It's 1996 so Wikipedia doesn't exist yet. Google doesn't exist yet. But Tim's crap hypermedia system (the "World Wide Web") exists and so you just need to know where to look to find information about porcupines.
I didn't watch videos in 1996 because it'd take hours to receive a short low resolution video, even reading web comics was quite an undertaking, I remember downloading all of Bruno (at the time) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_(webcomic) over night so I could read it. But the fact you don't have to explicitly "go online" makes a huge qualitative difference even though the bandwidth is tiny.
mathgeek 24 minutes ago [-]
Internet access used to be billed by the minute back in the Prodigy/Compuserve/AOL days, and early phone plans mirrored that for ease of marketing.
rcleveng 6 hours ago [-]
WoW. That's certainly a surprise to me. I'd never expect an invoice after not putting in a card.
I also believe this is totally just a case of "billing and metering is hard, and may actually be a larger engineering effort than your actual service".
I was just looking at them earlier today since our Github actions are slow AF, and while they sounds great, this tells me it'll cost me more time to make sure I babysit it than most other trials.
With most of these, they end, the service stops working, and you have a choice to make: (a) it was worth it sign up, (b) not worth it revert.
kylegalbraith 5 hours ago [-]
Founder of Depot [0] here. Feel free to try us out. We have a real free trial that is time based that doesn’t do odd things like this. Also have usage limits that you can put in place to further clamp down on runaway surprises.
This is where the "billing is hard" explanation and the user trust issue overlap
c-flow 2 hours ago [-]
This reminded me of our experience with Gusto - we signed up to their R&D credit payroll offset service in May last year - their offset fee is calculated as a percentage of the benefit you get. We filed our federal tax return in September, so there naturally wasn't any payroll offsetting until October. They still charged for services they didn't deliver so it was more cash out on day one which really goes against the purpose of the tool. They argued it was in the small print that said "we charge when you sign up" when I ticked a box. I thought that was quite outrageous. I still do.
mohi-kalantari 1 hours ago [-]
Can I ask how much did they charge you? for how long
c-flow 27 minutes ago [-]
About $330, per month, for 5 months.
zarzavat 4 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of the business practices of the Austrian NIC. Usually domain names expire if you don't renew them. In Austria, unless you explicitly cancel the domain name by fax, they just roll the registration over to the next year and then send you to collections[1] if you don't pay up.
There's no rule that domain names expire unless you renew them, at least for ccTLDs. It's just a convention. Conventions lead to assumptions, and assumptions can be used to scam people.
In general there's two types of businesses: businesses where you pre-pay (e.g. McDonalds), and businesses where you post-pay (e.g. a sit-down restaurant). If you take a conventionally pre-pay service and apply post-pay pricing to it, you have yourself a perfect scam.
They do that or they did that? (you are linking to a decade old post)
nicbou 2 hours ago [-]
This would not surprise me with a German service provider, although it got much better in the last decade.
flyingshelf 50 minutes ago [-]
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gblargg 5 hours ago [-]
> In order to use the Blacksmith Software Inc Service, You must set up an account. During the account setup process, You will be required to connect your GitHub account and install Blacksmith’s GitHub integration in your org, and add a valid payment method, such as a credit card, which will be processed through Stripe. Alternatively, for larger contracts, You may request to be billed via invoice.
> By providing payment information, You authorize us to charge Your credit card for usage fees or, in the case of invoice-based contracts, agree to make timely payments as specified in the invoicing terms.
Unless this guy had a larger contract and requested to be billed via invoice, this is a violation of terms and he should tell them to stuff it.
keyle 4 hours ago [-]
This doesn't seem like the right way to do business long terms. The off chance that someone actually take you up on it and pay your 'bill', you've destroyed a lot of goodwill and alerted the rest of the tech world of your scammy moves.
dheera 4 hours ago [-]
Also for those that require a credit card for a free trial, I always use a virtual card and cancel it. It's super fun to watch them cry when they can't actually charge you.
greyb 3 hours ago [-]
They will usually refund you if you end up getting charged because you forgot to cancel. It isn't worth the headache of a chargeback.
Plus they have to pay a fee for chargebacks regardless of whether they think it's valid or not, so strong disincentive.
Natsu 3 hours ago [-]
Funny, I got a fraud call recently because CrunchyRoll decided to try to renew a subscription I abandoned years ago and the card they have is expired.
I know it wasn't me because I gave up entirely on the service after they changed something about their login systems to reject my password and I could no longer get in. Support wanted me to jump through a lot of hoops and I just refused, choosing instead to just stop doing business there because I wasn't really watching anything at that point anyway.
This was around 2022, mind you, so they tried to renew me after several years with no explanation.
dheera 3 hours ago [-]
It's way easier to just not give them a way they can charge you. That way you don't have to deal with a support representative fakely asking you how your weekend was, and who doesn't actually care about your weekend.
flyingshelf 48 minutes ago [-]
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bartread 43 minutes ago [-]
> This question is for us: will we keep using Blacksmith, despite them giving us an unpleasant surprise and a prickly support exchange?
Interesting question, and I think it makes sense they’ve chosen to be pragmatic.
However, I wonder if Blacksmith get bitten in the arse by this. Hopefully that changes their behaviour but, like many startups, they might simply fail.
So I suppose the trick becomes to keep using the service without getting locked into it until it becomes clearer whether they will succeed or not, then perhaps you can consider taking advantage of platform features.
Even then, I don’t know how much I trust Blacksmith or would want to make it hard for myself to move away from them.
And on GitHub actions: Microsoft are very good at owning the platform and then making products and features that are just useful enough that it’s not worth switching to a better alternative but absolutely no more. GitHub Actions is an obvious example, Teams is another, but the list is long. To me it reads as a more modern variant of the anticompetitive behaviour of the 1990s. It sets up enough of a barrier to keep others out, and kills innovation. I’m not a fan.
harel 18 minutes ago [-]
Thanks for the warning. I would have chosen to be pragmatic as well but with another vendor. While I applaud your generosity with trust mine would have been evaporated at the first invoice.
twohaibei 16 minutes ago [-]
Whats worse, if people stay with them after such a scummy behavior, they will keep doing it.
yowo 34 minutes ago [-]
Unpleaseant experience and all, but sounds like complaining about not reading the full terms and then being shocked after the first bill, which is ok if you are buying a personal service, but that's a no-no in business.
The argument of "like many early startup do, we oversaw this and ignored that" doesn't really make it better.
yellow_lead 4 hours ago [-]
BlackSmith should get in this thread and explain themselves.
Also, can the author tell us how much this would have cost on GH actions?
aaronblohowiak 5 hours ago [-]
I can see their logic - instead of breaking people's builds, they are being the nice guys and letting you pay them back later. BUT, any time you break convention, you've dipped into your trust budget (even if you communicate it way more clearly than was apparently done here.)
beaylott 2 hours ago [-]
If you want a 'fixed' cost option for GitHub self hosted runners on your AWS I can't recommend https://runs-on.com/ enough.
sshine 2 hours ago [-]
I'm paying $60/mo. for a Kubernetes cluster running Forgejo + Forgejo Actions with plenty of parallel CI runners.
2 hours ago [-]
acosmism 2 hours ago [-]
oh wow
ErigmolCt 2 hours ago [-]
I can understand not wanting to kill someone's CI in the middle of active development, but then the product needs a very explicit consent step before converting free minutes into deb
arjie 5 hours ago [-]
Ah, too risky to try for small operators. Good to know. Thanks for the fair warning.
crohr 2 hours ago [-]
Skip the middleman, just use AWS with runs-on.com (I'm the developer). Better instance choice, much cheaper, and you can setup an AWS budget alert.
flyingshelf 46 minutes ago [-]
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dd8601fn 6 hours ago [-]
That sounds sketchy AF.
Joel_Mckay 2 hours ago [-]
Actually quite common, as the cost to fight them isn't worth the legal fees.
One must be extremely careful when signing off on something as a company representative.
One internal IP lawyer wanted a legal journal subscription, and left the tap running after they left the firm... that one cost $8k if I recall, as the journal sold the delinquent account to a collection agency. Took 3 weeks to verify it wasn't a scam, as the companies usually go quiet without the account number etc.
Some people are wired that way, and run their company on legal cons. Indeed, one doesn't want to have these people around your firm. =3
datadrivenangel 6 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a business partner who will squeeze you again later
MrAlex94 4 hours ago [-]
> This question is for us: will we keep using Blacksmith, despite them giving us an unpleasant surprise and a prickly support exchange?
Well, there are other drop-in GHA runner services, so I wouldn’t see why anyone would be tied into a specific provider.
Namespace.so are one and my experience with their support has been incredibly positive. Great team there.
Honourable mention to WarpBuild as well, who I used before them.
20thr 2 hours ago [-]
Hugo from Namespace here. Thanks for the kind words! We try really hard to be there for teams, appreciate you recognizing that.
cycomanic 2 hours ago [-]
Can someone explain this statements:
> While amusingly as of June 8 Blacksmith’s terms implied that their right to bill you is contingent on you providing payment information, a SaaS app certainly could have terms that obligate users to pay for unexpected overage when on a free trial.
> And let’s be clear: our agents run a lot of CI jobs, so we did expect to hit the limits of the free plan. We used the service and got value for it. So it’s not inherently dishonest, just surprising. My read is that they can do this.
So I read this that the terms say "blacksmith will only bill you if you provide payment information" but then they say that blacksmith can bill you if you don't provide payment information. That seems to contradict the terms, which I would assume underlie the "contract" that you agree to when agreeing to the terms.
kelnos 4 hours ago [-]
That's incredibly scummy. Article author estimates that "only" 5% of people would expect this outcome for a "try for free", "no credit card required" service, but I think that number is well below 1%.
Can't believe they continued using the service after this. I would refuse to pay (they have no legal basis to require payment, and their own terms of service seems to disagree with their behavior) and find a more ethical provider.
jruz 2 hours ago [-]
I’m running my own VPS with Woodpecker, paying for someone to do it for you seems absurd to me.
nullbio 5 hours ago [-]
Infisical does this too. They don't make it clear that they charge you for projects and machine identities upfront, and then you get slammed with a $800 bill on your first month.
usernametaken29 4 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of OpenAI which allows you to overcommit on prepaid tokens and then tries to force you into paying overpaid charges. Only they really can’t. You can’t make someone pay for a service they didn’t agree to with billing that doesn’t exist. I wish OpenAI best of luck with their shenanigans
tuananh 4 hours ago [-]
You should give Depot a try :)
lmm 3 hours ago [-]
Holy shit, all that and then they paid? Worse, decided to use this product on an ongoing basis? I'm not sure who I hate more, Blacksmith for doing this or OP for being such a doormat about it.
Havoc 2 hours ago [-]
Why do people pay for runner saas at all? Theyre not exactly hard to DIY
wielebny 1 hours ago [-]
That's a typical discrepancy between how US and EU sees civil agreements.
In Europe it's perfectly normal to be bound by terms of a paid service. I would never expect to avoid being liable for payments for services rendered only because I didn’t enter a cc number before exceeding free-tier limits.
Even in the comments below people are stating that this bill is valid only if they want to continue using the service.
TurdF3rguson 3 hours ago [-]
It's a bizarre way to run a SaaS and their website in migraine-inducing.
rubyn00bie 3 hours ago [-]
While I think it’s outrageous to send invoices to folks who aren’t paying customers… I’m a little surprised the service even has a niche (I’m old). I guess, with ubiquity of containers in our modern workflows, it seems strange to pay a service for what I assume is a dedicated, or well provisioned VPS, just to run CI. Hell you can probably get Jenkins (further showing my age here) running in less than an hour with Claude, GPT, or Deepseek on an obscure provider that offers cheap bare metal instances.
And for anyone who hasn’t used bare metal instead of over provisioned VPS for services the performance gap is noteworthy and substantial. Yeah, there is some risk because you have to worry about outages, upgrades, and configuration but for something like CI where there’s near zero data loss risk… it seems well worth it if performance of your CI/CD infrastructure is really an issue.
drcongo 3 hours ago [-]
Good timing, thanks, just scratched Blacksmith off my shortlist. Depot is the current front runner.
scared_together 7 hours ago [-]
How exactly would BlackSmith enforce the overdue payment? By sending the user to court?
tadfisher 6 hours ago [-]
Unlikely. But it is likely they will need to pay before resuming usage as a paying customer.
valleyer 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, civil legal proceedings (and/or hiring a collections agency) are generally how debts are pursued in the United States.
mistermuckle 4 hours ago [-]
By reading this comment, you agree, etc., etc.
...boilerplate...
...more boilerplate...
Terms... and conditions...
...limitations...
...liabilities...
mistermuckle 4 hours ago [-]
You now owe me $500.
mistermuckle 4 hours ago [-]
The $500 is now overdue.
somewhatgoated 4 hours ago [-]
By reading this comment, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
nikanj 3 hours ago [-]
"I ignored a ton of emails from Blacksmith and then I was completely surprised by something that happened"
Lessons learned:
1) When you spam your users with too many emails (engagement! marketing-thinly-wrapped-as-transactional-information!), they stop reading your emails
2) Read your damn emails
nerdile 3 hours ago [-]
B2B is just businesses fighting over the value chain.
Blacksmith can send as many invoices as they want.
If the other business doesn't think it's worth the cost after the free trial, they don't have to pay the invoices.
nailer 6 hours ago [-]
Blacksmith are wrong, but also they’re a YC company- they may be young founders that haven’t run a SaaS before and genuinely don’t know how to handle free trials.
nullbio 5 hours ago [-]
Doesn't take a genius to figure this one out. If you can't understand this before it becomes a problem, you have no place running a SaaS business.
garbagewoman 5 hours ago [-]
Give the growth hackers the benefit of the doubt, you reckon?
readthenotes1 6 hours ago [-]
Or: they know exactly how to handle free trials
zephen 4 hours ago [-]
tl;dr:
"Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it."
It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards.
You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger.
And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it valuable.
You have two choices. Pay up to keep using it, or stop.
The fact that you decided to pay up to keep using it is actually, imo, a pretty good advertisement for the service.
namenotrequired 2 hours ago [-]
It would be perfectly crumulent if it was explicitly communicated in advance.
hitekker 2 hours ago [-]
Billing statements disguised as marketing nudges is a cromulent business practice until the SaaS start sending bills to collections.
I think the author is being kind, both to themselves and startup practicing dark patterns. He walks through his own thinking, raises important questions and also gives the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t give.
IMHO, the article gets ahead of criticism well: accepting the valid critiques while also confining the weird/lazy ones to downvotes.
They got done in by a massive class action, that I was tangentially a beneficiary of, not because of the minutes claim, which was standard practice, but because they had failed to provide anyone with the cost of the data.
I think I paid them 300 bucks or something in the end. After further letting a 600 dollar agreement go to collections and settling with collections for 50%.
They are another kind of "soft" cap, pitched as an automatic convenience to the customer... But in practice they are too-often deceptive and harmful.
https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/are-banks-the-...
I got a preview of the modern world from about 1996 because my first shared student house (shout out to any Hitchers reading) had a single dial-up modem set to always connect to a free-to-use University modem and then used IP Masquerading (the ancestor of today's NATs) so that all of our computers could share this tiny connection.
So by the time of my 21st birthday, I was "always on" in the same sense that you'd always be today, except with much, much lower bandwidth and what I can tell you is that this, not the bandwidth is what makes the difference.
When you're "always on" the reflexive answer to "Wait, where do Porcupines live?" is to look online. It's 1996 so Wikipedia doesn't exist yet. Google doesn't exist yet. But Tim's crap hypermedia system (the "World Wide Web") exists and so you just need to know where to look to find information about porcupines.
I didn't watch videos in 1996 because it'd take hours to receive a short low resolution video, even reading web comics was quite an undertaking, I remember downloading all of Bruno (at the time) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_(webcomic) over night so I could read it. But the fact you don't have to explicitly "go online" makes a huge qualitative difference even though the bandwidth is tiny.
I also believe this is totally just a case of "billing and metering is hard, and may actually be a larger engineering effort than your actual service".
I was just looking at them earlier today since our Github actions are slow AF, and while they sounds great, this tells me it'll cost me more time to make sure I babysit it than most other trials.
With most of these, they end, the service stops working, and you have a choice to make: (a) it was worth it sign up, (b) not worth it revert.
[0] https://depot.dev
There's no rule that domain names expire unless you renew them, at least for ccTLDs. It's just a convention. Conventions lead to assumptions, and assumptions can be used to scam people.
In general there's two types of businesses: businesses where you pre-pay (e.g. McDonalds), and businesses where you post-pay (e.g. a sit-down restaurant). If you take a conventionally pre-pay service and apply post-pay pricing to it, you have yourself a perfect scam.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1bnjus/the_austri...
> By providing payment information, You authorize us to charge Your credit card for usage fees or, in the case of invoice-based contracts, agree to make timely payments as specified in the invoicing terms.
Unless this guy had a larger contract and requested to be billed via invoice, this is a violation of terms and he should tell them to stuff it.
Plus they have to pay a fee for chargebacks regardless of whether they think it's valid or not, so strong disincentive.
I know it wasn't me because I gave up entirely on the service after they changed something about their login systems to reject my password and I could no longer get in. Support wanted me to jump through a lot of hoops and I just refused, choosing instead to just stop doing business there because I wasn't really watching anything at that point anyway.
This was around 2022, mind you, so they tried to renew me after several years with no explanation.
Interesting question, and I think it makes sense they’ve chosen to be pragmatic.
However, I wonder if Blacksmith get bitten in the arse by this. Hopefully that changes their behaviour but, like many startups, they might simply fail.
So I suppose the trick becomes to keep using the service without getting locked into it until it becomes clearer whether they will succeed or not, then perhaps you can consider taking advantage of platform features.
Even then, I don’t know how much I trust Blacksmith or would want to make it hard for myself to move away from them.
And on GitHub actions: Microsoft are very good at owning the platform and then making products and features that are just useful enough that it’s not worth switching to a better alternative but absolutely no more. GitHub Actions is an obvious example, Teams is another, but the list is long. To me it reads as a more modern variant of the anticompetitive behaviour of the 1990s. It sets up enough of a barrier to keep others out, and kills innovation. I’m not a fan.
The argument of "like many early startup do, we oversaw this and ignored that" doesn't really make it better.
Also, can the author tell us how much this would have cost on GH actions?
One must be extremely careful when signing off on something as a company representative.
One internal IP lawyer wanted a legal journal subscription, and left the tap running after they left the firm... that one cost $8k if I recall, as the journal sold the delinquent account to a collection agency. Took 3 weeks to verify it wasn't a scam, as the companies usually go quiet without the account number etc.
Some people are wired that way, and run their company on legal cons. Indeed, one doesn't want to have these people around your firm. =3
Well, there are other drop-in GHA runner services, so I wouldn’t see why anyone would be tied into a specific provider.
Namespace.so are one and my experience with their support has been incredibly positive. Great team there.
Honourable mention to WarpBuild as well, who I used before them.
> While amusingly as of June 8 Blacksmith’s terms implied that their right to bill you is contingent on you providing payment information, a SaaS app certainly could have terms that obligate users to pay for unexpected overage when on a free trial.
> And let’s be clear: our agents run a lot of CI jobs, so we did expect to hit the limits of the free plan. We used the service and got value for it. So it’s not inherently dishonest, just surprising. My read is that they can do this.
So I read this that the terms say "blacksmith will only bill you if you provide payment information" but then they say that blacksmith can bill you if you don't provide payment information. That seems to contradict the terms, which I would assume underlie the "contract" that you agree to when agreeing to the terms.
Can't believe they continued using the service after this. I would refuse to pay (they have no legal basis to require payment, and their own terms of service seems to disagree with their behavior) and find a more ethical provider.
In Europe it's perfectly normal to be bound by terms of a paid service. I would never expect to avoid being liable for payments for services rendered only because I didn’t enter a cc number before exceeding free-tier limits.
Even in the comments below people are stating that this bill is valid only if they want to continue using the service.
And for anyone who hasn’t used bare metal instead of over provisioned VPS for services the performance gap is noteworthy and substantial. Yeah, there is some risk because you have to worry about outages, upgrades, and configuration but for something like CI where there’s near zero data loss risk… it seems well worth it if performance of your CI/CD infrastructure is really an issue.
...boilerplate...
...more boilerplate...
Terms... and conditions...
...limitations...
...liabilities...
Lessons learned:
1) When you spam your users with too many emails (engagement! marketing-thinly-wrapped-as-transactional-information!), they stop reading your emails
2) Read your damn emails
Blacksmith can send as many invoices as they want.
If the other business doesn't think it's worth the cost after the free trial, they don't have to pay the invoices.
"Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it."
It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards.
You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger.
And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it valuable.
You have two choices. Pay up to keep using it, or stop.
The fact that you decided to pay up to keep using it is actually, imo, a pretty good advertisement for the service.
I think the author is being kind, both to themselves and startup practicing dark patterns. He walks through his own thinking, raises important questions and also gives the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t give.
IMHO, the article gets ahead of criticism well: accepting the valid critiques while also confining the weird/lazy ones to downvotes.