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Hey folks - Greg here, I do product at Blacksmith. I want to say upfront - we've never pursued these invoices. If someone feels they didn't get value from the
by greg-m 3mo ago
Hey folks - Greg here, I do product at Blacksmith.
I want to say upfront - we've never pursued these invoices. If someone feels they didn't get value from the service, we've eaten that cost and always will.
There's a bit of an implicit policy decision on our side here that we did a bad job of communicating - I want to clarify that, and then talk about how we can fix it.
First, we wanted to let customers start using Blacksmith without a credit card. Very few infra startups do this today - CC validation is great for anti-abuse - but doing so has let us support a much greater number of free users.
Many of these free users have turned into full OSS sponsorships (most recently ccusage, and before that, OpenClaw) or large paying accounts, and we haven't wanted to cut those users off from trying us. It's a real pain point to find a credit card to put down for your company or OSS project's CI spend before you've even tried the service.
Second, not having a credit card on file means we don't actually know when credit card-less users intend to continue past their free trial.
Shutting down users CI workloads entirely seemed harsh, especially because doing so would fail builds and require a code change to resolve. If users could start without a credit card, we weren't going to then hold their runners hostage. Instead, we decided to just eat the cost for the small number of users who either abused our services or did not actually mean to use the service.
This worked, mostly - though every month we have gotten a number of support cases with users confused about their invoice. If they didn't intend to use the service past the free tier, we've voided out the invoice, and often given credits against a future bill if they intended to use the service, but were surprised by the behavior.
We have a lot to improve about our billing mechanics - but because our retention rate for these users has been so high, we have assumed great support could catch and resolve the ambiguity.
That said, there's two changes we can make now:
1. we clearly missed the mark on supporting this specific case - we should have offered to void this bill entirely given the surprise factor here.
2. We're prioritizing up making progress on a Wallet implementation that will let folks choose to suspend their runners rather than let them continue to run after they use up their free tier.
We also just launched a new billing/metrics view so users have better visibility into their free tier and Blacksmith usage.
I'm sorry for the bad taste this has left in everyone's mouth - I'll be hanging out here and on greg [at] blacksmith [dot] sh if you want to talk about your account specifically.
- baobabKoodaa 3mo agoThe main issue is that you deceptively communicated what happens at the end of the free trial. You decided to use the wording "disruption", which implies that workloads will be stopped, which is the opposite of what happened. This is deceptive and predatory. I will never use your software and after this happened I am AMAZED that anybody else (particularly OP, but also anybody who read this post) will continue to trust you with their workloads. The way I look at this is: if you're willing to do deceptive and predatory billing, why wouldn't you be also willing to sell access to intelligence agencies or some other "grey area" party who wants to do supply chain hacks?
- greg-m 3mo agoHey - First off, fair point on the free tier email. This fits in the same theme of clarity vs. trust for me: if we say disruption, but then leave your account enabled, that still feels deceptive even if it seems generous to us. We will fix. On your last point - I just want to note that this isn't a money-maker for us. Runner bills can be large (as they were here!), and we explicitly wanted to avoid actual charges to the user in favor of not collecting for a good amount of usage. Again, there's a clarity/trust tension there that you're right to call out, but the end goal is that more people can use cheaper, faster runners. We earn that trust today by being extremely easy to use and delivering on what we promise, and we need to add clarity to that list. Thanks for the feedback.
- inigyou 3mo agoThis whole incident supplied them a lot more publicity. I had never heard of them before today. Since today, I'm more likely to use them, not less, because now I know they exist. I couldn't be less likely than zero.
- baobabKoodaa 3mo agoAwful, but true.
- gblargg 3mo agoThis story is also educating people so if they do use them, they know in advance how they bill so won't be surprised.