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.

It would be perfectly crumulent if it was explicitly communicated in advance.

Billing statements disguised as marketing nudges is a cromulent business practice until the SaaS start sending bills to collections.

I think the author is being kind, both to themselves and startup practicing dark patterns. He walks through his own thinking, raises important questions and also gives the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t give.

IMHO, the article gets ahead of criticism well: accepting the valid critiques while also confining the weird/lazy ones to downvotes.