Item — HN Reader

One additional feedback, for consideration: to me, your Pricing page[1] doesn’t make it sufficiently clear that the “Starter” plan may incur costs at all (let alone in this ballpark). It’s now more apparent when looking at it in hindsight, but you have to either read very carefully, or go to the separate “View Features” page to understand this.

“0$ to get started, then pay as you go” reads to me: “0$ to get started, and then you can order add-ons and extra features as you need them”, not “$0 to get started, but we may start charging you virtually unlimited amounts at any point without prior notice”.

When signing up for the “Starter” tier initially, I completely misunderstood this. I didn’t have to enter any credit card or invoice details, so I thought as long as you don’t have that info from me, you can’t and won’t bill anything.

[1]: https://www.netlify.com/pricing/

3 comments

How on earth could I, as a customer, be sure that netlify hadn't paid someone to DDOS me? If I were in charge of a business like that, I would have that thought constantly...

Why go through that effort when they could just lie about site usage and say you incurred a bunch of traffic? Or make fake site "hits" from localhost?

It's really the trade-off for using any cloud host. You are implicitly trusting the host, their monitoring tools, their billing system, and their customer support when things go wrong

Both of those could be exposed via an audit or a whistleblower, either of which would destroy the company and its reputation overnight.

As opposed to just negligently allowing it from the outside?

Netlify still looks terrible here.

This is insane conspiratorial thinking? How would being the only host that happens to get DDOSed constantly be a good business proposition?

If you charge them for the extra bandwidth usage, it is. Not saying it's morally right, but definitely something a shady business would do. There's nothing "conspiratorial" about that. You'd be surprised how many conflicts of interest Big Gov and Big Business find themselves in.

> 0$ to get started, then pay as you go” reads to me: “0$ to get started, and then you can order add-ons and extra features as you need them

I think I disagree with this, but maybe I'm misunderstanding you.

Pay as you go sounds strongly to me that you pay based on your actual usage, not that it's free except for add-ons. A pay as you go phone, for example, does not imply you need to buy a telephony add-on, an SMS add-on, etc.

PAYG phones, however, were always prepaid, so I think I would expect PAYG hosting to be similar. That said, if my site was publicly accessible without my prepayment, I think it would be clear that it works the way it apparently does.

It's potentially misleading, but I don't think it's intentionally dishonest.

> you pay based on your actual usage

The disagreement is on what "usage" means. I wouldn't assume that "usage" includes things that don't take any action on my part.

If I don't use my phone, for example, I wouldn't get any "usage". A phone pay-as-you-go plan would probably trigger similar outrage if they charged you potentially unlimited amounts for phone calls that hit your voicemail overnight.

Do you know how web hosting works? You pay for a service so other people can use it. Extending the phone analogy, it is like you set up a public phone that anyone can use, and you pay for every time someone uses it.

Your analogy break down because no part of buying and setting up a phone yourself is free. If some company offers to set up a public phone "for free" in your neighborhood, and charge you for "usage", you wouldn't expect to be charged if you don't place calls.

The "do you know how it works" is completely unnecessary and rude.

> It's potentially misleading, but I don't think it's intentionally dishonest.

That’s my interpretation as well.

The usage of the term “add-on” is not clear here in my opinion. On their main pricing page[1], Netlify currently lists “Additional bandwidth” as “Add-on”. To me, that sounds like “I can actively order additional bandwidth in case the included bandwidth isn’t enough.” Not: “Additional bandwidth is automatically allocated and charged for as it happens to occur.”

In addition to that, there is a big bold “$0” at the top of the “Starter” plan.

[1]: https://www.netlify.com/pricing/

That was my understanding as well, since I signed up for MetLife years ago up until this very moment.