I agree with the post author that the tactic of allowing users to exceed plan limits and then upping their bill (yes, even with the 7 day notice email) is shady.
I hate this kind of behaviour from my tools - it feels like I am constantly being watched for when I "slip" and can be charged more without recourse. If you are going to use this behavior, provide a switch to enable hard limits on usage so a user cannot blunder unto having their budget blown by accident.
Edit: Also, why does the CEO have direct access to cancel user accounts and send them direct messages? Surely they have more important things to do?
People finding sympathy in the CEO behavior should make an effort to remember the number of time they likely ranted about their landlords / network provider / post service / bank service / ... on Twitter. How would you have reacted if they had decided to ban you without even letting you take back your assets?
Closing a customer's account without following procedures, on the CEO's whims, just because they don't feel comfortable with your practices, with a passive aggressive "sorry it wasn't a good fit for you!", deleting data in the process, is extremely unprofessional. There's no good light for this.
I do sympathise with their CEO on a personal level - but that's that: a personal level[1]. When your twitter account is not only public, but the public-facing twitter account of the CEO of a company: it should never contain "personal" messages that haven't been run by a PR team, otherwise SNAFUs like this will happen.
Save the customer rants and banter for Slack or the morning standup - not Twitter. Egads.
You'd think everyone would have learned from Elon Musk's example by now, surely?
[1] ...and even then I'm onlyy sliiiightly sympathetic, and ultimately I'm still siding with the article's author, provided they're being truthful. It was wrong for Ghost to unilaterally delete their content and retaliate against their user. They turned a possible PR victory (by acceding to the author's requests and upgrading their account for free (given the marginal cost of each user is negligible, giving a service credit doesn't cost them anything) into a disaster. Eeejits.
The CEO of Ghost has always struck me as weirdly defensive.
I remember ~2 years ago he tweeted something about how he was so proud to have built Ghost up with little help from anyone, no funding and was really pushing the angle of how the project is open source.
But then I replied with something like "Congrats on all of the success, but what about the thousands of folks who gave you $250,000+ on Kickstarter to help kick start the project?", because he didn't mention that anywhere.
He deleted his reply on Twitter since then, but it was pretty hostile and he even left the tweet off with saying he was blocking me. All from that 1 question I asked. Prior to that I've never contacted, messaged or replied to him so this had nothing to do with previous history.
Frustrated customers, even rude ones, are an opportunity to learn and improve. The CEO of Ghost unfortunately resorted to schoolboy tactics instread of acting like a diplomatic executive. Sure you should fire your bad customers. But don't mistake a frustrated customer for a bad one. They are not the same.
This. The customer is upset because he was wronged and he’s going to be frustrated. If you’re going to fire every rude customer you’re quickly out of business. People point out that „both sides are in the wrong“. But the extent to which they are wrong is different.
What I understand from your comment is that letting people know about the business practices of a certain company is a dick move. What I am struggling to understand is how you came to such a conclusion?
The tweet is not offensive in the least – all it shows is some signs of frustration from a customer, who may or may not be right.
The CEO on the other hand, looks like an ill-tempered, rude child, who should be nowhere near Twitter, let alone be the CEO of a company.
I invite you to consider another sequence of events, where the CEO doesn't show his childish side on Twitter, sends almost the same reply to the customer, noting that they will delete their site in 7 days if they don't want to pay, saying "here's link to the backup of your data".
Bonus points if he asks the customer for feedback on how they would like this to be handled in the future.
I dunno, Twitter is a perfect channel to get feedback on whether other people think something is shady. That doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not you responded to the email.
Why was he a bad customer? He was frustrated. And he exaggerated what he was frustrated about. That could have lead to an insightful conversation that improved the product. Don't make the mistake of thinking every frustrated customer is a bad one.
I don't think there is any excuse for how Ghost.org terminated an account like this. Maybe they have a fancy TOS, but the bottom line here is that they destroyed somebody else's work/investment/value, and apparently only because they didn't like the customer's behavior. In a (functioning) state of law, that should means you've just fucked yourself.
Maybe there's more to this story (there often is) and maybe the author is a class act himself, but that shouldn't change that Ghost.org should be liable for doing damage, if that indeed is for no valid reason (as it appears thus far).
One thing I do know for certain .. I wouldn't touch this company with a ten feet pole after this .. and if I had been an investor, I'd seriously reconsider that investment.
It’s not a “fancy TOS”. Almost all terms of service for almost every service online reserve the right to terminate service at any time, with or without cause. It’s just like at will employment, or any other voluntary association.
Either party can revoke consent at any time. If the customer can close their account at any time without notice, why shouldn’t the operator be able to as well?
The service did nothing wrong. They’re not a backup service, and if a customer ends up being more of a headache (either financial, emotional, or simply just time/attention) than the operator deems their custom worth, they have EVERY RIGHT to opt out of future transactions.
Furthermore, the customer explicitly agreed to this when they signed up. Even if they hadn’t, though, it is entirely reasonable for either party to the business relationship to be able to say, at any time, “this isn’t working for me, let’s stop.”
That’s how consent works in real life outside of business contracts, too.
This is a SaaS business, kicking someone out of the service because of something he said once on twitter is beyond ridiculous. This shouldn't ever have been a thought that crosses his mind.
The CEO has done massive harm to his company's reputation.
The customer was also right, IMO.
The practice of not stopping you from service if you go over your limits and than charging you is a good one, but only for things the user can't control - traffic is a good example.
For a limit a user actively needs to exceed - such as number of users - there should always be a warning at the very least. Not doing so is shady.
"fairly polite" email, eh? That's actually a very reasonable business practice of asking then charging instead of just making a site go dark.
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.
I was definitely being an ass when I first tweeted about it (IIRC, this was after I e-mailed them). I was generally frustrated with some wider issues around building my website so I decided to blow some steam by tweeting about it. I actually thought "that was too harsh" considering I had nothing but praise for how user-friendly Ghost was (and how great Ghost support was - shoutout to Sarah, whoever you are, you shouldn't be there).
The one thing you don't expect is that a CEO of a company would take the annoyance of an account with circa.350 followers seriously and respond with what is apparently vitriolic rage, not only cussing me out, but then immediately going to shut my website down even though I was talking to a support rep at Ghost about upgrading and getting migration underway.
The main problems are this:
1. An automatic upgrade within 7 days that triples in price is sleazy, there's no two ways to look at it. I don't know if it's an American thing, but in Europe, a company would be crucified for doing this. You always have offer and acceptance before agreeing to something. It would be very easy for Ghost to simply put a popup stating "you cannot add more staff users as you are on the basic plan - please upgrade here to do so". Again, no excuses here, it's clear that some customers are being caught out by these automatic charges, judging by the dozen people that have expressed similar issues with Ghost since I published my post. So much for being a non-profit.
2. Something I forgot to add to the story - the main reason I went over the 2 staff users I was permitted to have on my account was because I had invited Ghost support in as a staff user to help with migration. This made me really annoyed as I had some friends on to help with setting up the website and I had to kick them to avoid being charged triple - for bringing Ghost in to help with some stuff.
3. The CEO going from cussing on twitter to deleting my website (all within 15mins, as I was working on it) is unacceptable, again, from any POV. The people here talking about this being an acceptable practice to deal with "toxic customers" have clearly never actually been in a customer-facing role. You wouldn't last in such a position if you dealt with every disgruntled customer in such a manner. Stop LARPing.
Anyway, that's my side. I understand the cynical mood of Hacker News so I won't say more and let the people here make up their own minds.
Feel free to subscribe to the Post Apathy newsletter. I promise you it's enriching.
> An automatic upgrade within 7 days that triples in price is sleazy, there's no two ways to look at it
There are two ways to look at it. I use a tool that reports errors in my web app. After one of releases we started receiving a lot of errors and we reached the maximum on our plan. What would the proper response be? To just block all the incoming error reports until end of the month? Or maybe to send me an email saying "hey, you've reached your limit, if this continues we'll upgrade you to higher plan automatically"? There's no clear answer here, that depends on your context (I used the app for work and having proper error reports was more important than the cost for me), but there are two ways to look at it.
> respond with what is apparently vitriolic rage
not defending CEO's response (it was very inappropriate), aren't you doing the same right now? You're retweeting stuff like "F* Ghost and F* their CEO" with their accounts tagged.
"1. An automatic upgrade within 7 days that triples in price is sleazy, there's no two ways to look at it. I don't know if it's an American thing"
Since the Ghost Foundation is based out of Singapore and the terms of service state that any disagreements are subject to the jurisdiction of the Courts of Wales and England I would say it isn't an American thing.
My bank provide me with a "e-card" functionality (I can create virtual VISA card with a definite amount of money on it). It is so useful to deal with this new trend of automatically opt-in subscription.
If you try to charge me without my consent, the card will just block. Some company even try to send their collection people at me, but I usually remind them that those shady contract where you pay more without any confirmation on your side won't stand in a European court :)
I read the comments before the article and going by the defenders of the CEO, I expected the user to be well and truly in the wrong. But wow, nowhere near. They were a paying customer and far from a free-loader. The dispute was over staff accounts which are surely a non-factor in server load and other costs to Ghost. The user wrote an aggressive email that would take five seconds for support to kill-with-kindness in response, the same content in a tweet, and lost their work.
I can only assume there is more to the story or the CEO was having a particularly frustrating/upsetting day because otherwise this is a pretty dodgy response.
I don't think either party comes out especially well here, but my sympathies lie with the CEO. The only thing I might have done differently would be to include a tarball of the site in the "Sorry it was not a good fit" email, thereby avoiding the accusation of wasted work.
If I'm providing a service and someone has a problem with it, I expect them to look to resolve it with me first, before tweeting about "shady practices".
Added in edit: People seem to think I believe the CEO acted well and that I'm defending him. I don't, and I'm not. But neither party comes out well from this, and I can see why the CEO acted as he did, even if I think it was flawed.
Yeah, neither party looks good here, but my sympathies doesn't lie with Ghost (nor the CEO).
The user complained about something, then the company deleted his content? Feels like it's missing something in the middle. Why would Ghost simply delete his website because he's complaining? Feels like they are making the decision for him, instead of just leaving things as they are, and if the user doesn't upgrade, then they don't.
> If I'm providing a service and someone has a problem with it, I expect them to look to resolve it with me first, before tweeting about "shady practices".
Yeah, you might want to readjust your expectation if you ever end up running a service on the internet. This happens _constantly_ and if you start feeling you need to delete users content when this happens, then please don't run a service for public usage.
The tweet doesn't contain the "shady practices" wording you quote. Critising is normal when you have a bad experience and if you don't expect it, you're going to be very very disappointed when you launch a product that actually has a few users.
Both parties handled it with emotion and childishness.
The CEO should not have acted the way he did. No excuses for what he did.
I wanted to be careful before blaming OP but after reading his blog post, he did not send a polite email to begin with and then on top of that, he immediately complained on Twitter and even accused them of shady practice. He went too far. Sorry OP, an email that starts with "This is an extremely shady business practice and makes me question my commitment to moving to Ghost" is NOT a polite email, whether you are right or wrong. A Polite email would have been "I am a little surprised receiving this email from you guys and wasn't aware of this rule you guys have. Can I get more time to think about this since I am not sure I want to pay that kind of money" etc etc.
On top of that, OP says "I also decided to tweet about it - because that’s what people do, right?". No OP. People don't do that by default. Good customers try to work it out with the business first. They wait for a first response. They give them a little benefit of doubt before making judgements. If you cannot resolve it together in a friendly way and you feel you have been wronged, go ahead and rant on Twitter by all means. But it was a knee jerk reaction on OP's part to post on twitter which accused Ghost. No business likes these types of customers. Of course, the CEO had an equally if not worse response and now Ghost deserves all the negative press. This doesn't absolve OP's immature reaction. I cannot agree with their tactic.
> If I'm providing a service and someone has a problem with it, I expect them to look to resolve it with me first, before tweeting about "shady practices".
That’s just someone being frustrated. Maybe its not the right thing to do and a bit rash, but that you will have a few frustrated customers act rash is part of being in business. It doesn’t make the guy look great, but its still not a reason for the CEO to say he looks like an asshole (which IMHO makes him look just as bad, for the same reasons the customer looks bad, as you described it) and then cancel his account without warning (which is just outright an asshole move).
That's the difference between being a company and a person. The threshold for an entity taking money for a service to be publically highlighted is lower than for a person behaving badly
Agreed, both appear unprofessional here, I don't sympathise with either any more than two children I might walk past bickering in a playground.
Instead of emailing about 'shady business practices' off the bat, why not just ask the question? 'Please limit my account to the features of tier X rather than autoupgrade me'.
Instead of tweeting, wait for an email response. Then if necessary, again just ask the question: 'uh, what if it goes viral and I break 100k limit too?'.
Then the CEO, well, why's he even getting involved, just ignore it. If he must reply on Twitter, why not just answer the question about what happens on the 100k limit? Why not apologise that autoupgrade wasn't desired and say (even if bullshit) you're grateful for the feedback and it'll be reviewed? Certainly don't start calling customers 'asshole's on the internet.
But.. the tweet seemingly had no traction (so maybe it didn't matter!) but what was 'what are you on about [...] asshole' even supposed to achieve?
Same and there are costs involved in hosting and automatically billing for bandwidth is generally preferred by customers to shutting down the site when it goes viral. It's also the standard in the industry. If you link a credit card and agree to a pay-for-what-you-use plan, then yeah, you'll pay for what you use.
This is indefensible, and terrible for Ghost's reputation. Both you and the CEO should be groveling. This was a huge mistake. Please think of the actual engineers, designers, and everyone else who works on this product, who are probably facepalming over this. What a horrible representation of one's work. Hopefully you can still sympathize with them, along with the customer.
(The withholding and potential destruction of data and IP, not the tweeting).
Fully agree. Both parties should have handled it better, but I can understand the CEO. Entitled customers who immediately complain on social media are people you should avoid whenever possible.
Yeah, I'd also side with the CEO in terms of his Twitter reply, but not with shutting the site down. I think the OP going to complain on Twitter is going overboard; it's not as though he didn't get any warning at all before being upgraded and he is using features that he's expected to pay for.
I'm not a "startup" guy. I've worked at many places and I've helped a lot of SMB's turn around their company with only a decently designed website and some better customer service.
One thing I have always said is that you can have a million good reviews. But it will be only one that will be the downfall of your company.
This reminds me of that. This was an opportunity to fix what the user was complaining about. Instead the CEO's behavior clearly shows what kind of support to expect when you're unhappy with the service. I've complained publicly about gmail before, never would I think I would have my account removed and data deleted by the CEO. "LIKE US OR I WILL BAN YOU!"
Ghost uses one of my GitHub apps [1][2] that I wrote in my free time after their CTO asked me to do it [3], and I wonder how would their CEO feel if I would ban them because I condemn wiping customer data in retaliation for being criticized in public.
Even if they decide to fire a customer, they should have notified them and let them export their data. Harming your customer's business because they criticized you is likely illegal, no matter how twisted your terms of service are, and I hope they will get sued for what they've done.
I was once infatuated with the digital nomad "community". One day, I came across a twitter thread where he (the "ceo" of ghost) and other prominent members of that community were engaged in a harassment campaign against customer service representatives of a local airline for delaying one of their flights. What I found particularly revealing was that they used various families with kids that were also waiting as a front for their own complaints, as in "How dare you make these families wait?", when in fact they meant "How dare you make _us_ wait?". I found that pretty gutless, and my admiration for this "community" began to wane as a result. Long story short, I'm not at all surprised questionable business practices and mistreatment of customers sprung from there.
In my opinion, Ghost made a mistake in terminating the service without prior notice (although I think it would be okay for them to do so with prior notice). The terms of the service allow doing so for any reason, but that's no justification. In fact, having such a term is a good reason to avoid Ghost.
Also, I find it interesting that Ghost didn't answer "What happens if an article goes viral and it breaks the 100k views boundary? Automatic charge?" question. The pricing page provides a reasonable response here.
> 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 can’t understand the CEO’s decision. This is valuable feedback on their practices. Yes the customer is angry but that should be okay! Imagine if professionals in other areas would behave the same (like doctors for example)... Behavior like this will lead to customers being scared to criticize Ghost. This is the opposite of what the team at Ghost should want.
Someone should not be regarded as a bad customer for complaining once. A bad customer should be defined as someone who over a longer time frame costs resources. And also only after talking to them and not being able to find common ground.
Wow, I'm surprised that so many call OP rude or a bad customer. What exactly did OP do wrong? I think his mistake was tagging CEO on Twitter, that's what costed him a website.
How many times do you argue with regular employees in a retail shop or over a phone? Obviously, it shouldn't happen, but it happens and you don't get kicked out of a shop. Here OP wasn't happy about auto upgrade, called out CEO on it, got his site deleted, wtf?
[+] [-] elliotpage|5 years ago|reply
I hate this kind of behaviour from my tools - it feels like I am constantly being watched for when I "slip" and can be charged more without recourse. If you are going to use this behavior, provide a switch to enable hard limits on usage so a user cannot blunder unto having their budget blown by accident.
Edit: Also, why does the CEO have direct access to cancel user accounts and send them direct messages? Surely they have more important things to do?
[+] [-] arcatek|5 years ago|reply
Closing a customer's account without following procedures, on the CEO's whims, just because they don't feel comfortable with your practices, with a passive aggressive "sorry it wasn't a good fit for you!", deleting data in the process, is extremely unprofessional. There's no good light for this.
In fact, the following story is a great example of the danger of this kind of practices: https://www.newsweek.com/bank-closes-accounts-criticizes-twi...
[+] [-] DaiPlusPlus|5 years ago|reply
Save the customer rants and banter for Slack or the morning standup - not Twitter. Egads.
You'd think everyone would have learned from Elon Musk's example by now, surely?
[1] ...and even then I'm onlyy sliiiightly sympathetic, and ultimately I'm still siding with the article's author, provided they're being truthful. It was wrong for Ghost to unilaterally delete their content and retaliate against their user. They turned a possible PR victory (by acceding to the author's requests and upgrading their account for free (given the marginal cost of each user is negligible, giving a service credit doesn't cost them anything) into a disaster. Eeejits.
[+] [-] nickjj|5 years ago|reply
I remember ~2 years ago he tweeted something about how he was so proud to have built Ghost up with little help from anyone, no funding and was really pushing the angle of how the project is open source.
But then I replied with something like "Congrats on all of the success, but what about the thousands of folks who gave you $250,000+ on Kickstarter to help kick start the project?", because he didn't mention that anywhere.
He deleted his reply on Twitter since then, but it was pretty hostile and he even left the tweet off with saying he was blocking me. All from that 1 question I asked. Prior to that I've never contacted, messaged or replied to him so this had nothing to do with previous history.
[+] [-] tchaffee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emsy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threatofrain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nix23|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tilolebo|5 years ago|reply
I honestly don't know what to think about this. On one hand I understand you want to create awareness on a practice you consider as shady,ok.
But from what I know, Ghost usually try to please its customers. It's a small team with hardworking members, competing against giants.
Attacking them on Twitter before they could even reply to your email: kind of a dick move.
[+] [-] kif|5 years ago|reply
The tweet is not offensive in the least – all it shows is some signs of frustration from a customer, who may or may not be right.
The CEO on the other hand, looks like an ill-tempered, rude child, who should be nowhere near Twitter, let alone be the CEO of a company.
I invite you to consider another sequence of events, where the CEO doesn't show his childish side on Twitter, sends almost the same reply to the customer, noting that they will delete their site in 7 days if they don't want to pay, saying "here's link to the backup of your data".
Bonus points if he asks the customer for feedback on how they would like this to be handled in the future.
[+] [-] tilolebo|5 years ago|reply
It would also make me reconsider using their service.
[+] [-] 0xdeadb00f|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codegeek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dustinmoris|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Jabbles|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24097420
It is interesting to see this in practice, and see this from the customer's point of view. Obviously they do not believe they are "bad".
[+] [-] tchaffee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elmo2you|5 years ago|reply
Maybe there's more to this story (there often is) and maybe the author is a class act himself, but that shouldn't change that Ghost.org should be liable for doing damage, if that indeed is for no valid reason (as it appears thus far).
One thing I do know for certain .. I wouldn't touch this company with a ten feet pole after this .. and if I had been an investor, I'd seriously reconsider that investment.
[+] [-] sneak|5 years ago|reply
Either party can revoke consent at any time. If the customer can close their account at any time without notice, why shouldn’t the operator be able to as well?
The service did nothing wrong. They’re not a backup service, and if a customer ends up being more of a headache (either financial, emotional, or simply just time/attention) than the operator deems their custom worth, they have EVERY RIGHT to opt out of future transactions.
Furthermore, the customer explicitly agreed to this when they signed up. Even if they hadn’t, though, it is entirely reasonable for either party to the business relationship to be able to say, at any time, “this isn’t working for me, let’s stop.”
That’s how consent works in real life outside of business contracts, too.
[+] [-] Illniyar|5 years ago|reply
The CEO has done massive harm to his company's reputation.
The customer was also right, IMO.
The practice of not stopping you from service if you go over your limits and than charging you is a good one, but only for things the user can't control - traffic is a good example.
For a limit a user actively needs to exceed - such as number of users - there should always be a warning at the very least. Not doing so is shady.
[+] [-] nacs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drenvuk|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] postapathy|5 years ago|reply
I was definitely being an ass when I first tweeted about it (IIRC, this was after I e-mailed them). I was generally frustrated with some wider issues around building my website so I decided to blow some steam by tweeting about it. I actually thought "that was too harsh" considering I had nothing but praise for how user-friendly Ghost was (and how great Ghost support was - shoutout to Sarah, whoever you are, you shouldn't be there).
The one thing you don't expect is that a CEO of a company would take the annoyance of an account with circa.350 followers seriously and respond with what is apparently vitriolic rage, not only cussing me out, but then immediately going to shut my website down even though I was talking to a support rep at Ghost about upgrading and getting migration underway.
The main problems are this:
1. An automatic upgrade within 7 days that triples in price is sleazy, there's no two ways to look at it. I don't know if it's an American thing, but in Europe, a company would be crucified for doing this. You always have offer and acceptance before agreeing to something. It would be very easy for Ghost to simply put a popup stating "you cannot add more staff users as you are on the basic plan - please upgrade here to do so". Again, no excuses here, it's clear that some customers are being caught out by these automatic charges, judging by the dozen people that have expressed similar issues with Ghost since I published my post. So much for being a non-profit.
2. Something I forgot to add to the story - the main reason I went over the 2 staff users I was permitted to have on my account was because I had invited Ghost support in as a staff user to help with migration. This made me really annoyed as I had some friends on to help with setting up the website and I had to kick them to avoid being charged triple - for bringing Ghost in to help with some stuff.
3. The CEO going from cussing on twitter to deleting my website (all within 15mins, as I was working on it) is unacceptable, again, from any POV. The people here talking about this being an acceptable practice to deal with "toxic customers" have clearly never actually been in a customer-facing role. You wouldn't last in such a position if you dealt with every disgruntled customer in such a manner. Stop LARPing.
Anyway, that's my side. I understand the cynical mood of Hacker News so I won't say more and let the people here make up their own minds.
Feel free to subscribe to the Post Apathy newsletter. I promise you it's enriching.
[+] [-] arnvald|5 years ago|reply
There are two ways to look at it. I use a tool that reports errors in my web app. After one of releases we started receiving a lot of errors and we reached the maximum on our plan. What would the proper response be? To just block all the incoming error reports until end of the month? Or maybe to send me an email saying "hey, you've reached your limit, if this continues we'll upgrade you to higher plan automatically"? There's no clear answer here, that depends on your context (I used the app for work and having proper error reports was more important than the cost for me), but there are two ways to look at it.
> respond with what is apparently vitriolic rage
not defending CEO's response (it was very inappropriate), aren't you doing the same right now? You're retweeting stuff like "F* Ghost and F* their CEO" with their accounts tagged.
[+] [-] justinclift|5 years ago|reply
https://ghost.org/conduct/
Wonder if that fits in somewhere, on either side?
[+] [-] tssva|5 years ago|reply
Since the Ghost Foundation is based out of Singapore and the terms of service state that any disagreements are subject to the jurisdiction of the Courts of Wales and England I would say it isn't an American thing.
[+] [-] maeln|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawn|5 years ago|reply
I can only assume there is more to the story or the CEO was having a particularly frustrating/upsetting day because otherwise this is a pretty dodgy response.
[+] [-] ColinWright|5 years ago|reply
If I'm providing a service and someone has a problem with it, I expect them to look to resolve it with me first, before tweeting about "shady practices".
Added in edit: People seem to think I believe the CEO acted well and that I'm defending him. I don't, and I'm not. But neither party comes out well from this, and I can see why the CEO acted as he did, even if I think it was flawed.
[+] [-] capableweb|5 years ago|reply
The user complained about something, then the company deleted his content? Feels like it's missing something in the middle. Why would Ghost simply delete his website because he's complaining? Feels like they are making the decision for him, instead of just leaving things as they are, and if the user doesn't upgrade, then they don't.
> If I'm providing a service and someone has a problem with it, I expect them to look to resolve it with me first, before tweeting about "shady practices".
Yeah, you might want to readjust your expectation if you ever end up running a service on the internet. This happens _constantly_ and if you start feeling you need to delete users content when this happens, then please don't run a service for public usage.
[+] [-] yokto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codegeek|5 years ago|reply
The CEO should not have acted the way he did. No excuses for what he did.
I wanted to be careful before blaming OP but after reading his blog post, he did not send a polite email to begin with and then on top of that, he immediately complained on Twitter and even accused them of shady practice. He went too far. Sorry OP, an email that starts with "This is an extremely shady business practice and makes me question my commitment to moving to Ghost" is NOT a polite email, whether you are right or wrong. A Polite email would have been "I am a little surprised receiving this email from you guys and wasn't aware of this rule you guys have. Can I get more time to think about this since I am not sure I want to pay that kind of money" etc etc.
On top of that, OP says "I also decided to tweet about it - because that’s what people do, right?". No OP. People don't do that by default. Good customers try to work it out with the business first. They wait for a first response. They give them a little benefit of doubt before making judgements. If you cannot resolve it together in a friendly way and you feel you have been wronged, go ahead and rant on Twitter by all means. But it was a knee jerk reaction on OP's part to post on twitter which accused Ghost. No business likes these types of customers. Of course, the CEO had an equally if not worse response and now Ghost deserves all the negative press. This doesn't absolve OP's immature reaction. I cannot agree with their tactic.
[+] [-] dkersten|5 years ago|reply
That’s just someone being frustrated. Maybe its not the right thing to do and a bit rash, but that you will have a few frustrated customers act rash is part of being in business. It doesn’t make the guy look great, but its still not a reason for the CEO to say he looks like an asshole (which IMHO makes him look just as bad, for the same reasons the customer looks bad, as you described it) and then cancel his account without warning (which is just outright an asshole move).
[+] [-] andybak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mavhc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|5 years ago|reply
Instead of emailing about 'shady business practices' off the bat, why not just ask the question? 'Please limit my account to the features of tier X rather than autoupgrade me'.
Instead of tweeting, wait for an email response. Then if necessary, again just ask the question: 'uh, what if it goes viral and I break 100k limit too?'.
Then the CEO, well, why's he even getting involved, just ignore it. If he must reply on Twitter, why not just answer the question about what happens on the 100k limit? Why not apologise that autoupgrade wasn't desired and say (even if bullshit) you're grateful for the feedback and it'll be reviewed? Certainly don't start calling customers 'asshole's on the internet.
But.. the tweet seemingly had no traction (so maybe it didn't matter!) but what was 'what are you on about [...] asshole' even supposed to achieve?
Just seems so petty, on both sides...
[+] [-] 55555|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] searchableguy|5 years ago|reply
If Sundar Pichai started banning hners for everytime they compain about Google here, half of HN would lose access to google services.
[+] [-] xenihn|5 years ago|reply
(The withholding and potential destruction of data and IP, not the tweeting).
[+] [-] spiderfarmer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wrren|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] millzlane|5 years ago|reply
One thing I have always said is that you can have a million good reviews. But it will be only one that will be the downfall of your company.
This reminds me of that. This was an opportunity to fix what the user was complaining about. Instead the CEO's behavior clearly shows what kind of support to expect when you're unhappy with the service. I've complained publicly about gmail before, never would I think I would have my account removed and data deleted by the CEO. "LIKE US OR I WILL BAN YOU!"
[+] [-] dessant|5 years ago|reply
Even if they decide to fire a customer, they should have notified them and let them export their data. Harming your customer's business because they criticized you is likely illegal, no matter how twisted your terms of service are, and I hope they will get sued for what they've done.
[1] https://github.com/dessant/label-actions
[2] https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/blob/master/.github/label-...
[3] https://github.com/dessant/support-requests/issues/6
[+] [-] parsimoniousplb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GlitchMr|5 years ago|reply
Also, I find it interesting that Ghost didn't answer "What happens if an article goes viral and it breaks the 100k views boundary? Automatic charge?" question. The pricing page provides a reasonable response here.
> 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.
[+] [-] njsubedi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] searchableguy|5 years ago|reply
This is a standard condition in most ToS: we can kick you out for any reason whatsoever.
[+] [-] ramino|5 years ago|reply
Someone should not be regarded as a bad customer for complaining once. A bad customer should be defined as someone who over a longer time frame costs resources. And also only after talking to them and not being able to find common ground.
[+] [-] llacb47|5 years ago|reply
https://archive.fo/MdOfw
https://web.archive.org/web/20200815110730/https://postapath...
[+] [-] adamzapasnik|5 years ago|reply
How many times do you argue with regular employees in a retail shop or over a phone? Obviously, it shouldn't happen, but it happens and you don't get kicked out of a shop. Here OP wasn't happy about auto upgrade, called out CEO on it, got his site deleted, wtf?