Got one of these emails too. I haven't used the account in almost 10 years, they must have many thousands of these accounts that have been dormant forever and are now getting hit with "invoices" for services rendered. Looks like a real dick move, no thanks.
Great way to ruin the FogBugz brand and reputation: move everyone from free to paid tier without consent, and send out emails with a short notice telling them they will be charged $30/month - when most of these users haven't heard from/of them in over a decade. The flood of complaints is hilarious.
Honestly, I doubt the people who bought it care. It looks like some random company with some random stock photos that is just trying to extract as much money as possible.
Not the first time we've seen an acquirer completely screw up a brand in order to make more money.
Imagine the number of people who get this email on a user who left the company five years ago - and how many would just start paying assuming it’s some important part of something somewhere?
I feel like the FogBugz reputation has been being ruined for at least 5 years now, probably closer to 10. They were just letting it languish, not making any improvements. We saw the writing on the wall ~3 years ago, and I spent a month migrating all of our FogBugz tickets and wiki content over to Jira+Confluence
FogBugz got bought out by a vulture capital style firm that fired everyone and outsourced everything. They're going to extract as much value as they can. The reputation doesn't matter if they can sucker enough people into paying for it.
> FogBugz got bought out by a vulture capital style firm that fired everyone and outsourced everything. They're going to extract as much value as they can. The reputation doesn't matter if they can sucker enough people into paying for it.
As I understanding, that's a the strategy of a lot of private equity: burn goodwill and turn it into cash.
This should be illegal. I can understand raising the rates on existing paid plans automatically, if nothing else it's eventually reasonable for inflation purposes, but auto-converting from free to paid? No.
I would go further and say most people get away with bullshit, which is why human civilization finds itself slowing circling the drain like a turd in the toilet.
I suspect (IANAL) that in a sense, it already is, in that anybody testing this in court would deny the existence of any form of contract acceptance, and that would be the end of it.
It's probably legal to send messages like this, just like it's legal for ski slopes to have "We aren't at fault for anything" statements on every ticket. It's when they tried to enforce it that they'd find the law wasn't on their side.
It should be illegal to make claims that you know are not legally valid.
Of course this would be a horrible rule to enforce between the "the contract changes weren't run by legal" and "that line is enforceable in this outher jurisdiction that we operate in". But scaring average consumers with a massive contract and a line at the end "even if part of this contract is unenforceable the remaining clauses apply" is just abuse of people who don't have the legal power to actually test if the claims are valid and get screwed over.
Very often with contract law there is mostly no such thing as 'knowing a claim is not legally valid'. A lot of contract law is established by precedent, meaning in those cases nobody including the judge knew the enforceability of the issue before the judgement was written. Cases are also rarely identical examples of previous cases, meaning there can be an element of precedent setting even in cases that seem routine.
I don't think it should be illegal to have unenforceable clauses. Just ones that are known to be unenforceable. For example look at your average ISP out TV provider contract and there are a handful of these designed to prey on the public that doesn't know better.
It would definitely be difficult and messy to enforce, quite likely to messy to be feasible, but I would like to see some rule like this passed.
I don't think it matters if it's legal. If they succeed in charging anyone, most people will respond with chargebacks, which their bank will likely support, in this case.
The only case I can see them getting money is if someone actually is using FogBugz, and is willing to pay, in which case it's fine.
Absolutely absurd. I haven't touched it for 13 years, and just received an email that they will be billing me $31.25 with 6 hours warning. This, of course, is a few hours after an email saying that my "free subscription" will be expiring in a month, not within hours.
The kicker is that the billing FAQ 404s, the "account URL" 500s, and there is no apparent way to log in to the account that they are billing me for.
At this point the best I can do is hope they don't have any real PII to try to collect their bullshit bill.
Same here. It's was probably around 13 years as well, probably to try it out and never touched it since. My "account URL" shows 500 error as well. Here's the almost empty auto-reply if you reply to the email:
Hi,
Please reach out to the Fogbugz support team by visiting the following portal;
https://support.fogbugz.com/hc/en-us/
Thank you,
Fogbugz team.
If you poke around in the support articles they mention the cause of this: they also deleted all idle accounts without notice and depending on when you got hit by that, might not even be able to recover it. So they're trying to bill you for a service that they can't even provide.
I recently noticed a collections agency sending emails that don't pass DKIM checks. Since the company's main business model is invoicing via email and their revenue is substantial, I'm positive it's malice, not incompetence. An intentional way of racking up late fees.
I'd just ignore it out of principle. They won't have a CC on file and I never agreed to these terms. Good luck collecting since what they're doing isn't legal in pretty much any jurisdiction, and I reject the idea that I need to take action to not be billed.
It may or may not be defensible but chances are the terms of service you agreed to included a phrase that states they can make changes to those terms and you have to review them periodically or you’ll be deemed to have accepted them.
Luckily we live in "law is law" land and not "contract is law" land, and the law does take kindly to concepts like hotswapping concepts in a predatory manor.
I'm more concerned about them affecting my credit score... these clowns haven't a legal or moral leg to stand on but there's no way to cancel the free account that I haven't touched for 7 years. The hyperlink to my instance 500s and their support portal is either broken or disallowing new user registrations (despite me trying three browsers, two devices, and spending 10 minutes in the dev console manually enabling various buttons for password setting on the new account page and trying their ZenDesk URL instead of the custom one). Any emails to their customer success address tell users to log into this nonfunctional support portal.
Me writing this post is 10% commiseration and 90% documentation for if I have to talk to a court or credit bureau.
It’s a terrible move, and everyone should ignore the email. (Obviously, not legal advice, just my personal opinion.)
I don’t recommend anyone do business with them, whether as a customer or anything else; I was CEO of Fog Creek when we decided to sell FogBugz, and if I knew the difference between what we were told ahead of the deal and what happened after, I never would have approved it. I didn’t see that they’d done this latest shitty thing until now but I really lament that they’ve sunk to an even lower new level.
to phrase it a little nicer; they may not have technically known but that would be due to naivety / willfull blindness that there is at least of possibility of something like this happening, but the payout was worth more than the downside risks to the decision makers who stood to benefit
This has got to be a bug no? Otherwise this is the most insane monetization attempt I've ever seen... there's no way any of these old accounts even have a valid payment method. Why even attempt this? So many questions...
I registered and have not logged in since 2012. This is what I got 12 hrs ago.
To me, It does not seem like they are charging me, seemingly because I never entered any billing data?
```
Dear cheesedudles,
Your current free subscription for FogBugz is expiring on October 16, 2022. To continue using FogBugz, please add payment details to your account today.
Because you're already a valued FogBugz user, we've automatically upgraded your account to include up to five individual users with your new paid subscription. Plus if you renew now, you qualify for 50% off any subscription tier, including the five-user license tier. Follow this link to upgrade your subscription plan now.
Trouble upgrading? Please create a ticket on our support portal support.fogbugz.com.
I got that too, but there's an email that gets sent 3 - 4 hours after that one. Look for "Your Manuscript Account" from "FogBugz Customer Success". Of course, any billing attempt won't succeed without updated payment info (unless their next step is to try to send it to collections....)
"Hi!
This email is to notify you that we will be charging $31.25 to your prepaid account (Account URL: [redacted]) on Sep 17, 2022 for the following services:
- Monthly discounted (50.00%) fee for FogBugz for up to 5 users for the period September 17, 2022 to October 17, 2022. - ($12.50)
- Monthly discounted (50.00%) fee for FogBugz-TimeTracking for up to 5 users for the period September 17, 2022 to October 17, 2022. - ($6.25)
- Monthly discounted (50.00%) fee for FogBugz-Wiki for up to 5 users for the period September 17, 2022 to October 17, 2022. - ($6.25)
- Monthly discounted (50.00%) fee for FogBugz-Agile for up to 5 users for the period September 17, 2022 to October 17, 2022. - ($6.25)
Once these charges have been processed, they will appear on your online statement, available here:
[unique URL redacted]
For more information on billing, see our FAQ here:
EDIT: Oh wow. Try clicking on that FAQ link. Or if you want to save a click, the ZenDesk reply says "Oops, this help center no longer exists. The company you're looking for is no longer using our help center."
Nothing is working. I thought that I'd be "nice" and login and cancel my account. Can't do that either, you just get a 500 errors from the sad Kiwi who now has to go live with his new evil masters.... Poor kiwi.
At least they haven't "upgraded" the 500 page kiwi – all the others have two mouths. Because they thought people wouldn't understand that a bird's beak is its mouth.
Tried the same thing with Jumpcloud. Used it for a while. Disabled all users and moved on. 3 years (!!) later some debt collection lawyer contacts me about my $8000 bill. Wtf. Good luck collecting that.
To play devils advocate, is this not just an exercise to remove stale accounts? It looks like everyone who received the email does not have a payment method on their account so it seems more like "If you don't add a payment method to your account we'll be closing it?"
That could be handled much better in that case. "Dear valued customer"... You know that I haven't logged in over 10 year, don't use the service and never paid anything. I'm not a valued customer.
Why not just write: Hey, we notice that your account isn't actively use, click here to close it.
If you want to remove stale accounts, then send a 60-day warning and then delete the accounts. Don't try to act like fly-by-night scam artist and demand money for something you're not owed.
has anyone their DPO contact? legal page goes into nowhere, but I'm going to leverage the full extent of my gdpr given rights against them because of this dick move
> Our current customers are our only focus, and each should expect excellence from every aspect of IgniteTech. If at any time you believe we are falling short, the buck stops on my desk.
I use both because of different companies we work with. FogBugz is much friendlier, but Jira does more. And Jira also has a massive number of free and commercial integrations available. When DevFactory purchased FogBugz from
Fog Creek they went into rent collecting mode. They keep the lights on, but they are not going to renovate or introduce new features.
I got that e-mail too, on a decade-old test account: first an e-mail that reads like my account simply "expires" if I don't update. Then an invoice.
Here's what I don't get: After a stunt like this, any reputation/brand value that you might have had is gone. So, the obvious conclusion is they bought the company purely to pull this trick. Any other value the company might have had is deleted. Can that have been worth it? Very few people will pay voluntarily, I can't imagine them successfully collecting the money, and the acquisition price probably wasn't 0 either. I can't imagine that the math checks out, or does it?
Someone once told me that as recently as the late 2010s AOL was making millions of revenue off of old dialup accounts from the 90s that people just never cancelled and the cards just kept running. That's what they're probably shooting for here.
Very few of these 13 year old accounts are going to have valid card data on file, though. Any cards that were valid back then have long since expired. Seems to me that they're just spamming a bunch of people for no reason?
The expiry date of the credit card needs to be updated every couple of years. How can AOL keep charging a credit card if they don't have current information for it?
I used to enjoy reading the "Joel on Software" blog in e.g. 2004, and that was around the time he/they were working on this product. I guess it's been sold on, perhaps many times, since, and I guess if the new owners are trying this then they don't have many/any actual real paying customers.
It seems such a shame. The blog (and presumably the product, although I never used it) was brimming with such optimism and confidence, "this is how you run a good business!" etc.
I bet Joel didn't envisage that product ending like this when he wrote all those articles. :(
My first reaction on receiving this email was that is was a scam / phishing thing, then after checking that the URLs were genuine, I thought perhaps they'd been hacked somehow.
Good luck to them trying to charge me for a free account that I used for 1 week more than 10 years ago, I'm fascinated to see how this 'revenue hacking' strategy works for them.
Hail GDPR. I have a lot of trust and faith in the European corporate and business culture as far as these things go, but I'm happy I can make companies here delete my payment details, so tricks like these can't be pulled.
So I checked my email and I had two trial accounts in the past. Once in 2010, and once again in 2014 with a different email where I'd apparently forgotten I'd tried it out in 2010. Both said they were for on-demand trial accounts and would expire. I got a confirmation of the expiriation for the 2014 account and that email did not get this auto-upgrade email, but the 2010 one I got no confirmation of expiry and did get this auto-upgrade email. To be generous, maybe older trials weren't properly marked ended but this is still a pretty shit way to handle it.
(of course, the 2010 account gives a 500 error trying to open the management page and they asked me to provide billing details so it's probably not much more than a stub at this point).
124 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/search?q=fogbugz&src=typed_query
"Good luck with the chargebacks FogBugz."
Not the first time we've seen an acquirer completely screw up a brand in order to make more money.
As I understanding, that's a the strategy of a lot of private equity: burn goodwill and turn it into cash.
Of course this would be a horrible rule to enforce between the "the contract changes weren't run by legal" and "that line is enforceable in this outher jurisdiction that we operate in". But scaring average consumers with a massive contract and a line at the end "even if part of this contract is unenforceable the remaining clauses apply" is just abuse of people who don't have the legal power to actually test if the claims are valid and get screwed over.
I don't think it should be illegal to have unenforceable clauses. Just ones that are known to be unenforceable. For example look at your average ISP out TV provider contract and there are a handful of these designed to prey on the public that doesn't know better.
It would definitely be difficult and messy to enforce, quite likely to messy to be feasible, but I would like to see some rule like this passed.
The only case I can see them getting money is if someone actually is using FogBugz, and is willing to pay, in which case it's fine.
The kicker is that the billing FAQ 404s, the "account URL" 500s, and there is no apparent way to log in to the account that they are billing me for.
At this point the best I can do is hope they don't have any real PII to try to collect their bullshit bill.
"Are you sure? Those really old accounts aren't even compatible with our current platform, they won't be able to even log in"
"Everyone!"
"Sigh..."
Title: "Notification - Please visit support team"
Sender: "Sales and Success"
The short body declares that I have to go to their support portal.
I can't tell whether this stems from incompetence or if their aiming for Spam on purpose. Given their behavior, I assume the latter.
Me writing this post is 10% commiseration and 90% documentation for if I have to talk to a court or credit bureau.
I don’t recommend anyone do business with them, whether as a customer or anything else; I was CEO of Fog Creek when we decided to sell FogBugz, and if I knew the difference between what we were told ahead of the deal and what happened after, I never would have approved it. I didn’t see that they’d done this latest shitty thing until now but I really lament that they’ve sunk to an even lower new level.
``` Dear cheesedudles,
Your current free subscription for FogBugz is expiring on October 16, 2022. To continue using FogBugz, please add payment details to your account today.
Because you're already a valued FogBugz user, we've automatically upgraded your account to include up to five individual users with your new paid subscription. Plus if you renew now, you qualify for 50% off any subscription tier, including the five-user license tier. Follow this link to upgrade your subscription plan now.
Trouble upgrading? Please create a ticket on our support portal support.fogbugz.com.
Enjoy your upgrade,
Team FogBugz ````
"Hi!
This email is to notify you that we will be charging $31.25 to your prepaid account (Account URL: [redacted]) on Sep 17, 2022 for the following services:
- Monthly discounted (50.00%) fee for FogBugz for up to 5 users for the period September 17, 2022 to October 17, 2022. - ($12.50)
- Monthly discounted (50.00%) fee for FogBugz-TimeTracking for up to 5 users for the period September 17, 2022 to October 17, 2022. - ($6.25)
- Monthly discounted (50.00%) fee for FogBugz-Wiki for up to 5 users for the period September 17, 2022 to October 17, 2022. - ($6.25)
- Monthly discounted (50.00%) fee for FogBugz-Agile for up to 5 users for the period September 17, 2022 to October 17, 2022. - ($6.25)
Once these charges have been processed, they will appear on your online statement, available here:
[unique URL redacted]
For more information on billing, see our FAQ here:
http://help.fogcreek.com/9912/fogbugz-billing-faq
All the best,
FogBugz Customer Success
EDIT: Oh wow. Try clicking on that FAQ link. Or if you want to save a click, the ZenDesk reply says "Oops, this help center no longer exists. The company you're looking for is no longer using our help center."
It's the debt collector who will lose out.
No?
No. If that were the case, why wouldn't they just have said so in the emails they sent out? Only "legitimate" explanation is it's a bug.
Why not just write: Hey, we notice that your account isn't actively use, click here to close it.
has anyone their DPO contact? legal page goes into nowhere, but I'm going to leverage the full extent of my gdpr given rights against them because of this dick move
e found: privacy@ignitetech.com
> Our current customers are our only focus, and each should expect excellence from every aspect of IgniteTech. If at any time you believe we are falling short, the buck stops on my desk.
> Eric Vaughan // CEO
Whose going email him?
kind of funny how they have all these C-level executives but there is no CTO listed. And this for a supposedly technical company..
Here's what I don't get: After a stunt like this, any reputation/brand value that you might have had is gone. So, the obvious conclusion is they bought the company purely to pull this trick. Any other value the company might have had is deleted. Can that have been worth it? Very few people will pay voluntarily, I can't imagine them successfully collecting the money, and the acquisition price probably wasn't 0 either. I can't imagine that the math checks out, or does it?
It seems such a shame. The blog (and presumably the product, although I never used it) was brimming with such optimism and confidence, "this is how you run a good business!" etc.
I bet Joel didn't envisage that product ending like this when he wrote all those articles. :(
I liked fogbugz back then but they clearly pivoted out of it and stopped really marketing it or even developing new features for it a long time ago.
Good luck to them trying to charge me for a free account that I used for 1 week more than 10 years ago, I'm fascinated to see how this 'revenue hacking' strategy works for them.
(of course, the 2010 account gives a 500 error trying to open the management page and they asked me to provide billing details so it's probably not much more than a stub at this point).
ESW Capital was discussed in “Software Sweatshop – Inside Billionaire Joe Liemandt's Empire” (2021): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28852956
Thats from the new owners website. What a dystopian tagline for your company. Then there's just a whole catalog of their dead software in a list too.
[0]: https://ignitetech.com/
Flame logos are pretty generic, so I wouldn't call it copying.