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
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.
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.
Uber dropped me and closed my account. They gave me warning, but I was fine with it and took no action to prevent them from doing it. The email said something about being based on no activity.
I know it's not exactly a subscription service though where they were making money from me whether I used the service or not. It was just surprising to me that someone felt the need to develop a cancel user purging system at all.
Uruky [1] (a Kagi alternative, but simpler and EU-based) does this in a more intentional way: You can only pay once for a period of time (one, three, six, or twelve months), there is no subscription! If, after that period, you want to keep using it, you have to pay again.
This was mainly done for privacy reasons, so less data needs to be stored in the account (it also only uses a randomly-generated account number, like Mullvad), but honestly, we don't want people paying that don't use the service.
And you're right, it makes "making money" much harder, but also, feels more honest.
We take a slightly different approach for https://pico.sh -- no automatic subscription, but we charge for an entire year. It's great for us because each sub is a year and if someone truly isn't using our services then it'll quietly drift into the background for the end-user.
Not any more. They'll keep billing you, and they'll even follow you getting a new card even if you don't explicitly update your account with the new card info. That does not sound like the same mental space as not charging people for being inactive.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
