6/9/2026 at 10:01:15 PM
by apike
6/10/2026 at 10:13:35 AM
Unpleaseant experience and all, but sounds like complaining about not reading the full terms and then being shocked after the first bill, which is ok if you are buying a personal service, but that's a no-no in business.The argument of "like many early startup do, we oversaw this and ignored that" doesn't really make it better.
by yowo
6/10/2026 at 6:55:37 AM
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%.
by protocolture
6/10/2026 at 9:07:24 AM
This is why I'm pretty sympathetic to hard caps by defaultby ErigmolCt
6/10/2026 at 9:25:00 AM
That makes me think of bank overdraft fees.They are another kind of "soft" cap, pitched as an automatic convenience to the customer... But in practice they are too-often deceptive and harmful.
https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/are-banks-the-...
by Terr_
6/10/2026 at 9:58:56 AM
Data was counted as minutes back then for you? I only remember kB and MB costs...by soco
6/10/2026 at 10:04:57 AM
> This question is for us: will we keep using Blacksmith, despite them giving us an unpleasant surprise and a prickly support exchange?Interesting question, and I think it makes sense they’ve chosen to be pragmatic.
However, I wonder if Blacksmith get bitten in the arse by this. Hopefully that changes their behaviour but, like many startups, they might simply fail.
So I suppose the trick becomes to keep using the service without getting locked into it until it becomes clearer whether they will succeed or not, then perhaps you can consider taking advantage of platform features.
Even then, I don’t know how much I trust Blacksmith or would want to make it hard for myself to move away from them.
And on GitHub actions: Microsoft are very good at owning the platform and then making products and features that are just useful enough that it’s not worth switching to a better alternative but absolutely no more. GitHub Actions is an obvious example, Teams is another, but the list is long. To me it reads as a more modern variant of the anticompetitive behaviour of the 1990s. It sets up enough of a barrier to keep others out, and kills innovation. I’m not a fan.
by bartread
6/10/2026 at 8:57:17 AM
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.by c-flow
6/10/2026 at 9:22:40 AM
Can I ask how much did they charge you? for how longby mohi-kalantari
6/10/2026 at 5:05:57 AM
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.
by rcleveng
6/10/2026 at 5:56:32 AM
Founder of Depot [0] here. Feel free to try us out. We have a real free trial that is time based that doesn’t do odd things like this. Also have usage limits that you can put in place to further clamp down on runaway surprises.by kylegalbraith
6/10/2026 at 9:19:47 AM
This is where the "billing is hard" explanation and the user trust issue overlapby ErigmolCt
6/10/2026 at 6:49:28 AM
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...
by zarzavat
6/10/2026 at 10:15:33 AM
They do that or they did that? (your are linking to a decade old post)by noja
6/10/2026 at 8:18:53 AM
This would not surprise me with a German service provider, although it got much better in the last decade.by nicbou
6/10/2026 at 9:57:49 AM
[dead]by flyingshelf
6/10/2026 at 6:02:48 AM
> 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.
by gblargg
6/10/2026 at 6:18:05 AM
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.by keyle
6/10/2026 at 6:44:45 AM
Also for those that require a credit card for a free trial, I always use a virtual card and cancel it. It's super fun to watch them cry when they can't actually charge you.by dheera
6/10/2026 at 7:19:33 AM
They will usually refund you if you end up getting charged because you forgot to cancel. It isn't worth the headache of a chargeback.Plus they have to pay a fee for chargebacks regardless of whether they think it's valid or not, so strong disincentive.
by greyb
6/10/2026 at 7:47:15 AM
Funny, I got a fraud call recently because CrunchyRoll decided to try to renew a subscription I abandoned years ago and the card they have is expired.I know it wasn't me because I gave up entirely on the service after they changed something about their login systems to reject my password and I could no longer get in. Support wanted me to jump through a lot of hoops and I just refused, choosing instead to just stop doing business there because I wasn't really watching anything at that point anyway.
This was around 2022, mind you, so they tried to renew me after several years with no explanation.
by Natsu
6/10/2026 at 7:26:45 AM
It's way easier to just not give them a way they can charge you. That way you don't have to deal with a support representative fakely asking you how your weekend was, and who doesn't actually care about your weekend.by dheera
6/10/2026 at 10:00:02 AM
[dead]by flyingshelf
6/10/2026 at 8:50:07 AM
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.by crohr
6/10/2026 at 10:02:11 AM
[dead]by flyingshelf
6/10/2026 at 6:21:25 AM
BlackSmith should get in this thread and explain themselves.Also, can the author tell us how much this would have cost on GH actions?
by yellow_lead
6/10/2026 at 6:17:22 AM
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.)by aaronblohowiak
6/10/2026 at 9:01:30 AM
If you want a 'fixed' cost option for GitHub self hosted runners on your AWS I can't recommend https://runs-on.com/ enough.by beaylott
6/10/2026 at 9:03:34 AM
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 debby ErigmolCt
6/10/2026 at 8:22:05 AM
I'm paying $60/mo. for a Kubernetes cluster running Forgejo + Forgejo Actions with plenty of parallel CI runners.by sshine
6/10/2026 at 8:38:18 AM
oh wowby acosmism
6/10/2026 at 9:04:16 AM
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.
by cycomanic
6/10/2026 at 5:33:47 AM
Ah, too risky to try for small operators. Good to know. Thanks for the fair warning.by arjie
6/10/2026 at 6:49:08 AM
> 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.
by MrAlex94
6/10/2026 at 8:47:33 AM
Hugo from Namespace here. Thanks for the kind words! We try really hard to be there for teams, appreciate you recognizing that.by 20thr
6/10/2026 at 4:27:49 AM
That sounds sketchy AF.by dd8601fn
6/10/2026 at 8:34:31 AM
Actually quite common, as the cost to fight them isn't worth the legal fees.One must be extremely careful when signing off on something as a company representative.
One internal IP lawyer wanted a legal journal subscription, and left the tap running after they left the firm... that one cost $8k if I recall, as the journal sold the delinquent account to a collection agency. Took 3 weeks to verify it wasn't a scam, as the companies usually go quiet without the account number etc.
Some people are wired that way, and run their company on legal cons. Indeed, one doesn't want to have these people around your firm. =3
by Joel_Mckay
6/10/2026 at 5:06:27 AM
Sounds like a business partner who will squeeze you again laterby datadrivenangel
6/10/2026 at 8:28:51 AM
I’m running my own VPS with Woodpecker, paying for someone to do it for you seems absurd to me.by jruz
6/10/2026 at 7:00:48 AM
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.
by kelnos
6/10/2026 at 6:14:53 AM
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.by nullbio
6/10/2026 at 6:54:16 AM
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 shenanigansby usernametaken29
6/10/2026 at 8:44:41 AM
Why do people pay for runner saas at all? Theyre not exactly hard to DIYby Havoc
6/10/2026 at 6:48:20 AM
You should give Depot a try :)by tuananh
6/10/2026 at 9:30:39 AM
That's a typical discrepancy between how US and EU sees civil agreements.In Europe it's perfectly normal to be bound by terms of a paid service. I would never expect to avoid being liable for payments for services rendered only because I didn’t enter a cc number before exceeding free-tier limits.
Even in the comments below people are stating that this bill is valid only if they want to continue using the service.
by wielebny
6/10/2026 at 7:22:23 AM
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.by lmm
6/10/2026 at 7:37:17 AM
It's a bizarre way to run a SaaS and their website in migraine-inducing.by TurdF3rguson
6/10/2026 at 8:16:02 AM
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.
by rubyn00bie
6/10/2026 at 3:33:54 AM
How exactly would BlackSmith enforce the overdue payment? By sending the user to court?by scared_together
6/10/2026 at 4:32:53 AM
Unlikely. But it is likely they will need to pay before resuming usage as a paying customer.by tadfisher
6/10/2026 at 6:19:07 AM
Yes, civil legal proceedings (and/or hiring a collections agency) are generally how debts are pursued in the United States.by valleyer
6/10/2026 at 7:45:08 AM
Good timing, thanks, just scratched Blacksmith off my shortlist. Depot is the current front runner.by drcongo
6/10/2026 at 6:49:55 AM
By reading this comment, you agree, etc., etc....boilerplate...
...more boilerplate...
Terms... and conditions...
...limitations...
...liabilities...
by mistermuckle
6/10/2026 at 6:50:53 AM
You now owe me $500.by mistermuckle
6/10/2026 at 6:51:59 AM
The $500 is now overdue.by mistermuckle
6/10/2026 at 7:14:02 AM
By reading this comment, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.by somewhatgoated
6/10/2026 at 7:51:41 AM
"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 nikanj
6/10/2026 at 7:55:16 AM
B2B is just businesses fighting over the value chain.Blacksmith can send as many invoices as they want.
If the other business doesn't think it's worth the cost after the free trial, they don't have to pay the invoices.
by nerdile
6/10/2026 at 4:40:09 AM
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.by nailer
6/10/2026 at 6:16:42 AM
Doesn't take a genius to figure this one out. If you can't understand this before it becomes a problem, you have no place running a SaaS business.by nullbio
6/10/2026 at 5:27:45 AM
Give the growth hackers the benefit of the doubt, you reckon?by garbagewoman
6/10/2026 at 5:04:44 AM
Or: they know exactly how to handle free trialsby readthenotes1
6/10/2026 at 6:26:10 AM
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.
by zephen
6/10/2026 at 8:22:25 AM
It would be perfectly crumulent if it was explicitly communicated in advance.by namenotrequired
6/10/2026 at 8:19:57 AM
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.
by hitekker
6/10/2026 at 5:10:34 AM
[dead]by vee-kay