The owner of ScrapingBee tweeted about a company who forgot to cancel their subscription, they agreed to a partial refund, but then they went silent, and launched a chargeback for $3250.
For personal accounts prepaid would make cloud offerings a lot easier and more predictable.
I personally don't use any "traditional" cloud services like AWS, GCP, because of the uncertainty of costs of anything going haywire while I'm at work or on vacation.
And many companies come here when they get a surprise bill after a buggy push. Not having a spend limit is more often than not a complaint. Notice I wrote "offer" not "switch to". They don't have to be mutually exclusive and big corporations could still get limitless spending if they want.
Subscriptions are healthy for some things: I have mixed feelings about Creative Cloud but it does make the product accessible to many people and also put updates into everybody's hands for products that they are continuously improving.
On the other hand I think for a lot of cases the real business case is "user will forget that their bank account is being bled dry by 20 subscriptions they forgot about."
Another one is that I've seen in the long term, together with bundling, they lead to industries that set new revenue records year after year despite being senescent. Cable TV is a particular case: subscribers had no ability to "walk with their feet" when MTV gave up showing music videos. I can't unsubscribe to CNN or Fox News or both of them and still keep my subscription to less pernicious channels. I'm afraid that Microsoft's GAME PASS is going to follow the same trajectory and make the scene for XBOX ONE games even worse than it already is. (Shoulda bought a PS4 is what I know in retrospect.)
I guess that it's not great to have such a request come in, but if the customer hasn't used the service at all for months, what would you actually lose by giving them a refund?
I run a small SaaS and it's surprising how many people never even use the service (over 20%).
It's a small service that runs for cheap, so we don't have a ton of engagement/nagging emails, but we do send a monthly email when the card is charged (with an easy link to cancel). And lots of people still don't cancel.
So now it's in our monitoring, at least for now, and we try to reach out when we spot non-users. I figure it's maybe great financially, but it's not great for the service (if they're not using it, they're not promoting it)
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 34.1 ms ] threadI personally don't use any "traditional" cloud services like AWS, GCP, because of the uncertainty of costs of anything going haywire while I'm at work or on vacation.
And many companies come here when they get a surprise bill after a buggy push. Not having a spend limit is more often than not a complaint. Notice I wrote "offer" not "switch to". They don't have to be mutually exclusive and big corporations could still get limitless spending if they want.
I prefer when making mistakes is difficult.
Subscription pricing certainly made Adobe products far more accessible when I was younger.
Now that I’m older I do wish I could pay a one off payment.
On the other hand I think for a lot of cases the real business case is "user will forget that their bank account is being bled dry by 20 subscriptions they forgot about."
Another one is that I've seen in the long term, together with bundling, they lead to industries that set new revenue records year after year despite being senescent. Cable TV is a particular case: subscribers had no ability to "walk with their feet" when MTV gave up showing music videos. I can't unsubscribe to CNN or Fox News or both of them and still keep my subscription to less pernicious channels. I'm afraid that Microsoft's GAME PASS is going to follow the same trajectory and make the scene for XBOX ONE games even worse than it already is. (Shoulda bought a PS4 is what I know in retrospect.)
It's a small service that runs for cheap, so we don't have a ton of engagement/nagging emails, but we do send a monthly email when the card is charged (with an easy link to cancel). And lots of people still don't cancel.
So now it's in our monitoring, at least for now, and we try to reach out when we spot non-users. I figure it's maybe great financially, but it's not great for the service (if they're not using it, they're not promoting it)