Do you plan to refund all previous free trial customers, who didn't contact the support, and actually paid unexpected overage fees?
Invoices are legally binding documents in many countries, and even if that might not be the case in your country, not everyone might be aware of that fact.
> since it gives their AP team a real cost to work from instead of a ballpark of us vs. GitHub
Same could be achieved by showing the real cost in the web app and/or sending a report via email, without scaring them away, and possibly _extorting_ them.
Technically, here the paying customer experience was the problem, not the free trial one, because they were automatically upgraded.
Generally, you don't want to award people/companies that don't respect you. I'm not saying that you shouldn't re-evaluate them in the future, but they will walk away with the wrong lesson if you just start throwing money at them.
If you view it through a paying customer lens instead, then all you see is a paying customer who chose not to pay their invoice and might get sued. There's nothing strange about that.
All of the problem here was with the transition from free trial to paying customer.
Personally I do care if I get hacked or if my clients get hacked. If you don't care, you don't care, I guess. For you it's enough that the "paying customer experience" (???) is good, whatever that is. Okay buddy.
Luckily for them, every OS has (at least one) native way of building applications, and with the power of AI they could easily make 3 different desktop UIs, while reusing the same core logic.
> They pioneered things like iCloud Private Relay and privacy protecting cloud backups for devices.
They didn't pioneered it, they just brought it to the masses. Tor was here before the Private Relay, and most open source backup applications offer E2EE out-of-the-box.
Well I had assumed that GitHub was profitable, since it used to be independent, and it feels like it should be profitable right now. But I tried Googling "is GitHub profitable" just now, and the first few results seem to suggest that either it's still losing money or that nobody knows. So I was likely incorrect about that point, sorry.
> considering how much Actions credits are given away to open source projects as well as free users?
GitLab does the same thing, and they are definitely profitable [0], so that on its own isn't necessarily a barrier.
It doesn't have a great cross platform support (no Linux client, and there are many complaints for the Windows client).
Personally, I dislike that you cannot restore an older version of a file on laptop/phone, and must instead use their web app, for which you need to disable ADP, which defeats its purpose.
While there isn't a proper Linux client, if you find yourself on a Linux box and need to sync to or from iCloud, rclone[1] works great. Just putting this out there in the hope that it might help someone.
It's also (ironically given TFA) what I used to sync all my files off dropbox when I cancelled my subscription because of their misuse of root to re-add their thing to special permissions on macOs after I had removed it.[2]
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338 not trying to reopen a flame war, but for me personally, that was one of those things a company doesn't get to do to me twice. As soon as it happened, I copied my files off and cancelled. In fact I'm there somewhere in the comments on that article saying I was going to be cancelling and I immediately did.
Funnily enough, Windows 98 is the first OS I remember with a sharing menu (“Send To”, which is memorable to me because the official Russian localization of it was suggestive of an obscenity). It seemed so pointless back then.
I'm quite sure there are many application hosting providers which rely on container runtime such as runC (default runtime of containerd/Docker), and a shared kernel between users.
In a just world, those companies would be held legally accountable for negligent practices. The Linux kernel upstream has made it clear for decades that security is a dirty word.
Invoices are legally binding documents in many countries, and even if that might not be the case in your country, not everyone might be aware of that fact.
> since it gives their AP team a real cost to work from instead of a ballpark of us vs. GitHub
Same could be achieved by showing the real cost in the web app and/or sending a report via email, without scaring them away, and possibly _extorting_ them.
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