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Completely off topic but the title made me wonder if there’s any subscription service that cancels you if you don’t use it? Not quite usage based billing - plans that cancel (or pause) without use? I can’t think of any - terrible business model of course

> plans that cancel (or pause) without use?

Kagi is one of them.

[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#fair-pricing

I recall a db service does that too long ago. Although I'm not sure if they changed policy as it's been a while.


netflix did this. I didn't use streaming for a (long) time, they turned it off. Kudos.

Tarsnap has you put money into a stored balance, and when that balance goes to zero (and after a grace period), they delete your backups.

Not exactly a subscription since it's a stored-balance system, but still.


In 2020 Netflix claimed they would start to automatically cancel inactive accounts [1], but the post has since disappeared. I also remember Microsoft saying the same thing about Xbox Game Pass but have not searched for their statement.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200522032356/https://media.net...


Slack. Deactivates a seat after 28 days of inactivity. A really good practice.

edit: and obviously reactivates after activity


Kagi arguably “pauses” your subscription if you don’t use it in a month. They give you a credit at the end of the month that then applies to the next month, so that people aren’t charged if they aren’t using it.

tailscale used to do this for teams ("active user billing"), but recently changed pricing models to be purely seat-based.

they had a whole webinar about it with all sorts of justification, although most of it sounded like mba-isms to me.



Xbox/Microsoft Game Pass actually automatically canceled for me when I hadn't used it.

I’m stealing this idea!

Kagi does this

> the company doesn't care about community and only cares about profit.

There are plenty of examples of VC funded companies that care about community & don't "only care about profit". Bluesky is a good one (literally a community / social platform). That's such a black & white take it baffles me.

> Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services

A "large portion of devs" (the majority) use so many VC funded services? Probably _most_ services devs use are VC funded. GitHub itself - was VC funded.

You can have an anti-VC opinion but you have to also live in reality.


> GitHub itself - was VC funded

And look where we are now. What sane person would got looking for an alternative only to sing up to the same bs again.


> Probably _most_ services devs use are VC funded. GitHub, was VC funded?

GitHub was founded in a very different world. Would we start using it today is the question.


You're missing the reference (which the parent comment linked for you)


It's 350k now? I need to catch up


Unrelated; what does "mendral" mean? It's a very... unmemorable word


I am sure you heard before: there are only two hard things in CS: cache invalidation and naming things.

In the history of this company, I can honestly say that this SQL/LLM thing wasn't the hardest :)


And the other of the two problems is off-by-one errors.


Google says a shaft or spindle on a lathe, to which work is fixed while being turned. They could probably make up a story about "we're the center point that lets your LLM work" or something.


That would be a mandrel.


Whoops! Thanks


We have already found out, Waymo is SAE Level 4, Tesla is SAE Level 2


I own a Tesla (and subscribe to "FSD", >70% of my miles are FSD without issue). As it stands though, Waymo is by every metric objectively better at "autonomous driving".

I would also love to see every car brand have full autonomous driving. It seems like you think you must be in one camp or another, and that one has to "beat" the other - but that's not true. Both can be successful - wouldn't that be a great world?


Your original post was very public under a very well known brand - you have no expectation of privacy after that. People are going to respond to you publicly.


It's not about a privacy, but common courtesy. Especially after I gave them a heads up in DM about the post and offered to answer any more questions they had. They said they'd reach back out, then didn't, then posted this publicly? Really strange.


Why was your PM making tech decisions?


Looks like you need the "quiet part" said out loud:

Chances are, the company was fishing for (or at least wouldn't mind) VC investment, which requires things being built a certain (complex and expensive) way like the top "startups" that recently got lots of VC funding.

Chances are, the company wanted an invite to a cloud provider's conference so they could brag about their (self-inflicted) problems and attract visibility (potentially translates to investment - see previous point).

Chances are, a lot of their engineering staff wanted certain resume points to potentially be able to work at such startups in the future.

Chances are, the company wanted some stories about how they're modern and "cloud-native" and how they're solving complex (self-inflicted) problems so they can post it on their engineering blog to attract talent (see previous point).

And so on.


Yes. Exactly. The company wanted to be "modern" in terms of tech stack and they kept getting buried in the thought that using serverless would keep them cool. The PM was also close friends with the CEO so everyone blindly nods to him.


I love it. The UX is terrible but the visualization is very "outside the box". Experiments like this are important on the road to finding novel interfaces. Not everything has to look like a v0 shadcn app. Thank you for sharing!


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