For 1k with such a clear culprit, isn't that worth suing, like in small claims with self representation (perhaps sitting with a lawyer for 1h to go over what you plan to submit and say)? Or at least talking to a human, since a "refund" of -7 sounds like another computer bug?
This seems a hardcore case of moral damage worth at least some hundreds thousands dollars in a settlement or even suing some millions dollars out of them, doesn't it? Perhaps you should at least ask a lawyer before just humbly reporting the bug to them and forgetting.
My initial gut reaction is to not chase this one unless the amount of money is going to make/break your business. The amount of time & mental energy required to chase things like this can almost immediately overtake the original loss. Just do a simple calculation: Your hourly consulting rate X total hours spent dealing with this bullshit = The additional cost this asshole customer has incurred so far.
My red line for a 1-10mm USD business would be 25-50k USD. I would seek recovery at that threshold, and only if I had skin in the game (aka some substantial marginal cost per customer). If I got screwed out of "here's my enterprise pricing menu and here's some demo API access to the sandbox DB instance", I would not be so upset. However, if I got screwed out of hundreds of hours of deep consulting work, I would almost certainly lawyer up.
Not necessarily a refund, but some sort of compensation could be in order. “A reboot has occurred. For this inconvenience, we have credited the CC associated with your AppleID $2, (or $5 Applebucks or a free coffee).” Design out the potential for gaming the system for infinite coffees.
If you impose a cost on a user, you compensate the user for that cost. I think that is the basic idea behind tort law. To keep lawyers and associated expense out of the system, do it voluntarily.
But if voluntary compensation of users is being ignored, a change in liability doctrine for software might be in order. Start with the biggest players who can afford the legal costs to resolve the doctrinal issues.
It's amazing these companies don't have a "buy your way out of trouble" service. I'm sure this guy would be willing to pay a few hundred $ to have a human resolve it.
Perhaps that option would create a new set of complaint about people being extorted out of support fees for problems that weren't their fault.
The company I worked for at the time decided to pay since it was affecting users and we had to do an annoying work around. If I remember correctly we got the $100 back a month or so later, with a one liner reply saying something to the effect of "this will be fixed in a service pack at some point, godspeed."
> We tried really hard to make management aware and actually succeeded in that, only for management to follow up and say we don't have enough money to fix it, and they understood the possible outcomes.
Jesus, that sounds like a nightmare! Hope you get it all sorted out. Probably even more expensive but any potential of suing the developer collectively with the other people? Sounds like they'll have annoyed a lot of people!
Sue them for what exactly? OP went over the limits of his plan, publicly shamed the company for doing nothing wrong, got refunded and got his data back.
I totally get that that's how businesses are run now, and I'm sure that the OP would have to lawyer up and be prepared to spend time and $ regardless if he wants to pursue damages.
My argument is that the OP should have at least received a response from the company or have his/her concerns moved to the appropriate dept by the CS team, instead of being patronized by an autoresponder.
No. It's evidence that something was lost, but not a measure of the actual damages you suffered. Whose to say if you lost $100 or $100k? In the absence of the lost material there's most likely no way to demonstrate anything.
In this case some sort of statutory deterrent would probably be a much more effective solution. I honestly doubt that regulation is a good solution here though - bugs like this are so severe from a PR perspective that there's already a huge incentive to avoid them.
Do yout get reimbursed for 10 days of lost traffic/productivity then? There should be a safeguard, that the maker of the claim would cover damages caused by the invalid claim...
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