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ubac | 4 years ago

You continued taking your cut from my subscriptions after I'd left your platform (I think because you didn't really understand how Stripe Connect works) and just refused to pay the money back for over a year. What was the deal with that? It struck me as both deeply dishonourable and not even sensible as a business move. Why did you do that, and what does it say about Substack as a company that you did it?

discuss

LordAtlas|4 years ago

I might attribute this to Hanlon's Razor. On the other hand, that's not very flattering to them either.

ubac|4 years ago

ha! Yes I definitely think the original overbilling was incompetence not malice, but not just saying "we're so sorry we overbilled you, we're not sure how much we took exactly but please let us give you $x to definitely cover it" was more like malice than incompetence (in practice my guess is something closer to pridefulness than malice, but I can't pretend to understand what's in their hearts etc)

1123581321|4 years ago

It’s obviously undesirable, but it makes sense to me that a busy company that doesn’t understand Stripe Connect would struggle to research and rectify this. That’s assuming you identified the technical issue correctly, of course.

klelatti|4 years ago

Hello Uri. Love the browser! Did you get this sorted in the end and have you heard of others having this issue?

ubac|4 years ago

Oh thanks that means a lot to me!

I would say it was partially sorted -- I eventually dm'ed their PR person (once they hired one) and somehow she pretty quickly figured out how to pay back part of the money, but refused to send any documentation of what she was paying back or answer questions about various discrepancies, which made it a big hassle on the bookkeeping side. And I never got an explanation or apology from the Substack guys, or any thanks from them for giving them a chance to make it right for more than a year. Truly one of the weirdest life experiences to me -- aside from the moral aspect, I would have thought screwing over one of your biggest customers for no obvious reason is bad for business. But it seems to be working out for them so far, so, what do I know!