Years ago I got my first internet enabled mobile, and the carrier advertised it as having "300 free minutes" as part of the trial period, which is great. So I used 297 minutes of internet services in the first month, but aha actually the minutes only referred to telephony, and I was stung with a ~12,000 dollar overdue mobile internet invoice (360 dollars per megabyte or something equally ludicrous)

They got done in by a massive class action, that I was tangentially a beneficiary of, not because of the minutes claim, which was standard practice, but because they had failed to provide anyone with the cost of the data.

I think I paid them 300 bucks or something in the end. After further letting a 600 dollar agreement go to collections and settling with collections for 50%.

This reminded me of our experience with Gusto - we signed up to their R&D credit payroll offset service in May last year - their offset fee is calculated as a percentage of the benefit you get. We filed our federal tax return in September, so there naturally wasn't any payroll offsetting until October. They still charged for services they didn't deliver so it was more cash out on day one which really goes against the purpose of the tool. They argued it was in the small print that said "we charge when you sign up" when I ticked a box. I thought that was quite outrageous. I still do.

WoW. That's certainly a surprise to me. I'd never expect an invoice after not putting in a card.

I also believe this is totally just a case of "billing and metering is hard, and may actually be a larger engineering effort than your actual service".

I was just looking at them earlier today since our Github actions are slow AF, and while they sounds great, this tells me it'll cost me more time to make sure I babysit it than most other trials.

With most of these, they end, the service stops working, and you have a choice to make: (a) it was worth it sign up, (b) not worth it revert.

> In order to use the Blacksmith Software Inc Service, You must set up an account. During the account setup process, You will be required to connect your GitHub account and install Blacksmith’s GitHub integration in your org, and add a valid payment method, such as a credit card, which will be processed through Stripe. Alternatively, for larger contracts, You may request to be billed via invoice.

> By providing payment information, You authorize us to charge Your credit card for usage fees or, in the case of invoice-based contracts, agree to make timely payments as specified in the invoicing terms.

Unless this guy had a larger contract and requested to be billed via invoice, this is a violation of terms and he should tell them to stuff it.

This doesn't seem like the right way to do business long terms. The off chance that someone actually take you up on it and pay your 'bill', you've destroyed a lot of goodwill and alerted the rest of the tech world of your scammy moves.

This reminds me of the business practices of the Austrian NIC. Usually domain names expire if you don't renew them. In Austria, unless you explicitly cancel the domain name by fax, they just roll the registration over to the next year and then send you to collections[1] if you don't pay up.

There's no rule that domain names expire unless you renew them, at least for ccTLDs. It's just a convention. Conventions lead to assumptions, and assumptions can be used to scam people.

In general there's two types of businesses: businesses where you pre-pay (e.g. McDonalds), and businesses where you post-pay (e.g. a sit-down restaurant). If you take a conventionally pre-pay service and apply post-pay pricing to it, you have yourself a perfect scam.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1bnjus/the_austri...

I can understand not wanting to kill someone's CI in the middle of active development, but then the product needs a very explicit consent step before converting free minutes into deb

If you want a 'fixed' cost option for GitHub self hosted runners on your AWS I can't recommend https://runs-on.com/ enough.

Skip the middleman, just use AWS with runs-on.com (I'm the developer). Better instance choice, much cheaper, and you can setup an AWS budget alert.

Can someone explain this statements:

> While amusingly as of June 8 Blacksmith’s terms implied that their right to bill you is contingent on you providing payment information, a SaaS app certainly could have terms that obligate users to pay for unexpected overage when on a free trial.

> And let’s be clear: our agents run a lot of CI jobs, so we did expect to hit the limits of the free plan. We used the service and got value for it. So it’s not inherently dishonest, just surprising. My read is that they can do this.

So I read this that the terms say "blacksmith will only bill you if you provide payment information" but then they say that blacksmith can bill you if you don't provide payment information. That seems to contradict the terms, which I would assume underlie the "contract" that you agree to when agreeing to the terms.

I can see their logic - instead of breaking people's builds, they are being the nice guys and letting you pay them back later. BUT, any time you break convention, you've dipped into your trust budget (even if you communicate it way more clearly than was apparently done here.)

I'm paying $60/mo. for a Kubernetes cluster running Forgejo + Forgejo Actions with plenty of parallel CI runners.

I’m running my own VPS with Woodpecker, paying for someone to do it for you seems absurd to me.

> This question is for us: will we keep using Blacksmith, despite them giving us an unpleasant surprise and a prickly support exchange?

Well, there are other drop-in GHA runner services, so I wouldn’t see why anyone would be tied into a specific provider.

Namespace.so are one and my experience with their support has been incredibly positive. Great team there.

Honourable mention to WarpBuild as well, who I used before them.

Ah, too risky to try for small operators. Good to know. Thanks for the fair warning.

BlackSmith should get in this thread and explain themselves.

Also, can the author tell us how much this would have cost on GH actions?

Why do people pay for runner saas at all? Theyre not exactly hard to DIY

That sounds sketchy AF.

That's incredibly scummy. Article author estimates that "only" 5% of people would expect this outcome for a "try for free", "no credit card required" service, but I think that number is well below 1%.

Can't believe they continued using the service after this. I would refuse to pay (they have no legal basis to require payment, and their own terms of service seems to disagree with their behavior) and find a more ethical provider.

Sounds like a business partner who will squeeze you again later

Infisical does this too. They don't make it clear that they charge you for projects and machine identities upfront, and then you get slammed with a $800 bill on your first month.

This reminds me of OpenAI which allows you to overcommit on prepaid tokens and then tries to force you into paying overpaid charges. Only they really can’t. You can’t make someone pay for a service they didn’t agree to with billing that doesn’t exist. I wish OpenAI best of luck with their shenanigans

It's a bizarre way to run a SaaS and their website in migraine-inducing.

You should give Depot a try :)

Holy shit, all that and then they paid? Worse, decided to use this product on an ongoing basis? I'm not sure who I hate more, Blacksmith for doing this or OP for being such a doormat about it.

While I think it’s outrageous to send invoices to folks who aren’t paying customers… I’m a little surprised the service even has a niche (I’m old). I guess, with ubiquity of containers in our modern workflows, it seems strange to pay a service for what I assume is a dedicated, or well provisioned VPS, just to run CI. Hell you can probably get Jenkins (further showing my age here) running in less than an hour with Claude, GPT, or Deepseek on an obscure provider that offers cheap bare metal instances.

And for anyone who hasn’t used bare metal instead of over provisioned VPS for services the performance gap is noteworthy and substantial. Yeah, there is some risk because you have to worry about outages, upgrades, and configuration but for something like CI where there’s near zero data loss risk… it seems well worth it if performance of your CI/CD infrastructure is really an issue.

How exactly would BlackSmith enforce the overdue payment? By sending the user to court?

Good timing, thanks, just scratched Blacksmith off my shortlist. Depot is the current front runner.

"I ignored a ton of emails from Blacksmith and then I was completely surprised by something that happened"

Lessons learned:

1) When you spam your users with too many emails (engagement! marketing-thinly-wrapped-as-transactional-information!), they stop reading your emails

2) Read your damn emails

By reading this comment, you agree, etc., etc.

...boilerplate...

...more boilerplate...

Terms... and conditions...

...limitations...

...liabilities...

Blacksmith are wrong, but also they’re a YC company- they may be young founders that haven’t run a SaaS before and genuinely don’t know how to handle free trials.

tl;dr:

"Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it."

It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards.

You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger.

And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it valuable.

You have two choices. Pay up to keep using it, or stop.

The fact that you decided to pay up to keep using it is actually, imo, a pretty good advertisement for the service.