16 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 39.0 ms ] thread
Just got a bill for $1100! Thank god it's a mistake.
I got something similar for $1200. Glad I'm not the only one.
I've had a response on a support ticket as well as a reply on twitter. Seems they're working on it.
This was my morning heart attack.

Got an email from Heroku with the ominous subject line: "You have spent money."

The email encouraged me to log into my account and "review the charges."

So I logged in, checked the billing page, and found an invoice with a HUGE bill for what was supposed to be a free instance.

The question is: What's an appropriate way to say, "Sorry for accidentally making you think that you owe us $1,200, causing you to have a total freak-out, wondering where you're going to get that kind of money ... and only finding out that the bill might be erroneous by clicking on a small-print support message on the billing page?"

Heroku has said

"Invoices went out today with incorrect numbers.  We're terribly sorry about that!  We're working on a fix: "

on Twitter only. So if you only saw your email, you are in still in the dark

If you tweeted or opened a support ticket they responded some time ago - or at least they did for me. Still an email would have been better.
Update:

I received the "You have spent money" email at 4:20 a.m. Eastern.

It wasn't until 2:15 p.m. Eastern that I received a follow-up email explaining that the invoice I'd received was erroneous.

I deleted a couple of apps because of this fright. No follow up message on email, nor in the dashboard. I had to stop and delete these things because it was costing per minute.

It was only from searching online that herou tweeted "sorry about that". I'm hugely disappointed.

For future reference I think you can scale an app to 0 without deleting it using heroku ps:scale web=0 worker=0.

I had to remove scheduler from three of my apps too. It's frustrating but it did make me realise how trivial some of them were.

This is a great use case for system-wide messaging within your application.

While they didn't send out an email to users, they could've easily thrown up a banner on logged in pages indicating the current problem.

The initial shock of viewing the email invoice would be subsided when you login to realize they've got your back.

Even better would be to link to the status page for updates.

On my billing page there's a banner with a link to the status page for the issue (though it wasn't there when I looked earlier).

"We're experiencing problems with incorrect billing amounts being displayed on invoices"

This is the 2nd time it's happened to me (1st time occurred 2 years ago) so I was 99% sure it was a mistake. Still threw a support ticket for good measure
As others said I've also deleted all my apps from heroku. I was really scared, a bill of $700 out of nowhere, are you kidding??? And not even sending an e-mail right after when they've discovered the problem! I got in touch with their support and they took THREE HOURS to answer why I had to pay $700 for dynos I didn't use.