To be fair, even if he was only paying $5 a month, if there was a tiny chance that the compromise was done by an employee, any reasonable provider would be all over it.
My company solved it by giving everybody a flat rate every month. We can use it for internet or getting a better office chair, or whatever we see fit. Seems fair.
I disagree. People who are paying $5/month have a much lower threshold before they leave than an enterprise paying $20,000/month. Also larger more expensive services tend to end up with more business integration and the cost of moving to another service is typically substantial.
I think the reasoning goes so that of those who are willing to pay something, most are willing to pay $9.90/month. If there was a smaller plan with lower price, quite many would probably go for that one, instead of paying the $9.90.
Dividing a user's costs by the number of months of service they got isn't fair because it ignores the high risk they took on that the company would go out of business months after they dropped their $500 or $1000 or whatever.
They didn't start charging more. Telecom companies pull some shady tricks with plans and billing, but increasing the monthly fee without notice part way through your contract is not one of them.
He signed a contract for some period of time, and it wasn't up yet. After it was up, he would have had the option of one of the new plans, or switching providers, just like everyone else does.
If the writer of this blog post got his way and stirred the masses to complain over not getting the new 'customer deals', then the service providers would simply take away the new customer deals. That'd be 'fair', right?
He was a new customer once. He got one of those deals himself. Now he's pissed that someone, somewhere else in the world is paying less than him for cable.
The only other outcome would be contracts - like with cell phone providers, you'd sign a 3-year contract or somesuch for cable, and they'd offer you another 'new customer promotion' if you resign a new contract when your existing one is up.
Attempting to make things 'fair' just makes things worse for everyone.
Sure I trust them. The moment it's discovered that they've failed to hold up their end of the bargain, they're out $30 x some significant percentage of the users of that service per month. That's not chump change (to say nothing of the potential class action lawsuit for utterly failing to hold up a contract while continuing to charge customers for the services stipulated in said contract).
That is honestly totally fine. Companies dont want to deal with penny pinchers. They want a reliable corporate customer who is willing to commit to a yearly plan.
It was Google who set the price and service limit, not him, so I don’t think there’s any room here to argue that the price he was paying was unfairly low.
I'm a customer of several smallish (but bigger than 10 employees) services and if I'm paying something like $120/year for something even remotely useful, I'm not going to switch unless the competition solves a specific problem or I'm really mad at the current provider. In the former case I would at least have told support about my problem.
I do believe that there is "enough" money to be made solving real-world problems for people and treating them like humans so they aren't going to drop you like a hot rock at the first chance. I'm happy to see some voices confirming that in this thread.
As far as I can tell, $200/month is ridiculous compared to competitors. If I knew how to enforce "don't be a jerk and clearly overcharge" in law, I'd lay it out right here. It would be fair to require a moderate premium for legitimate privacy-upholding reasons.
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