“To add more staff you need to upgrade your account, upgrade with 1 click here”
I don’t agree that it’s “shady” but you can already tell that it would negatively affect conversion to directly inform people of what they’re doing, rather than waiting for them to do it and then automatically upgrading them.
If you charge on some unknown, like requests per second, then it’s better to allow the user to set an upper bound on finances anyway.
There was an explicit dispute over this. The original email from Ghost was concerned with the number of active staff users, and the customer is definitely right that Ghost just shouldn't allow excess staff users rather than allowing them and then automatically increasing your bill.
But the two plans in question don't differ only by the permitted number of active staff users. They also differ by the permitted number of page views per month. And the customer explicitly asked "what happens if I post something that exceeds the number of page views allowed for my plan?".
So yes, the question of whether the site should go dark is very much in play.
"shady" is an understatement, not an overstatement.
"If we auto-upgrade, there will be people who miss it or will be too apathetic or procrastinating to fix it, therefore better conversion rates" is on the bad side of "shady".
Still you're right that such warnings should not be side-channeled via email, but that can be just a mistake of a product design, not an intended tactic.
Either way, the CEOs response is such a giant red flag that any one who sees it should seriously reconsider doing business with him. He seems genuinely unstable.
“To add more staff you need to upgrade your account, upgrade with 1 click here”
Here's what Ghost does if you go over your traffic limits:
> Average views per month
> Views refer to the number of requests to your site each month. These are tracked much like an analytics 'pageview' - and are incremented with each page or API request.
> We never disable sites for traffic spikes, so no need to worry about the front page of Reddit or HN. If you exceed your limit consistently on a 3 month rolling average, we'll just let you know that you need to upgrade.
I think this is pretty good? It would be better if they allowed the user to set a hard limit in advance.
> I think this is pretty good? It would be better if they allowed the user to set a hard limit in advance.
I agree that that's pretty good, although it still leaves you vulnerable to a page that goes viral enough to get triple the number of allowed views. That will block your 3-month rolling average for 3 months, but if your monthly traffic looks like this:
Month 1: 50k views
Month 2: 50k views
Month 3: 400k views - no big deal, sometimes surges happen
Month 4: 50k views - you know, you're starting to push your limits...
Month 5: 50k views - OK, at this point, we need you to upgrade
Remind me to never use anything you make.
There is, however, a world of difference between a 1-click eula and a paid service agreement, where one has, at the minimum, voluntarily entered payment information to engage in a transaction.
Giving someone money is a far higher explicit endorsement/agreement to terms than a one-click eula.
Many businesses would complain about the lost business if it didn’t automatically scale to meet demand.
Then there are the cost capped users who would rather the site be disabled due to over usage.
> I was expected to stay on top of them or risk an automatic “upgrade” from $36 to $99 for having an extra staff user on my website? I had forgotten about this, but why not just block me from adding them?
So looks like Ghost allows you to add more members freely, does not warn or tell you anything when you do it, but then only tells you that you'll be upgraded automatically via email later? (It's partly a rhetorical question, but I genuinely don't know how it works).
the user didn't consent to scaling
But even if we talk about scaling here, As you noted different people will have different expectations. Some will prefer to get charged more and handle the extra traffic. Others will be the polar opposite and will prefer to cap unless they give explicit consent to upgrade.
I don't think you can avoid asking about it.
Not everyone can have Twitter clapbacks like Wendy's
They're not asking then charging, they're telling and charging. It's absolutely not a reasonable business practice to just bump you up to a different plan without explicit agreement.
Even less so since there's no "going dark" here, as TFA notes this was about adding extra staff users to manage the system, why not block these extra users with a paywall, why let them go through then send a mail indicating the account will automatically get upgraded?
But talking about going dark, as TFA asks and got no answer for: what happens if one of your posts suddenly gets popular, does ghost just keep upgrading your plan until you fit within the limits? Can you find yourself with a bill in the thousands through no fault of your own?
they're telling and charging
My guess is they just use the same system to track all the limits without really thinking about how well it works for different ones.
The Ghost CEO should have taken the higher road and there's no excuse for expunging your site but you were definitely being a dick first. I won't be using Ghost and I would try to avoid having you as a customer as well.