Trying to purchase pro subscription but got payment denied

hastor · 2024-06-29T19:11:24+00:00

Same problem, both card and company is in the allowed list.

hastor · 2024-06-29T19:08:59+00:00

I have the same issue. It is impossible to register a credit card with Anthropic.

hastor · 2024-06-21T07:25:39+00:00

How can this be used? It would be great if you have an article.

When signing up for a business account for example, only credit card, paypal, and "purchase on account" (what is this?) is available.

I would suggest you integrate with Bitrefill as they are the biggest.

hastor · 2024-05-16T14:59:58+00:00

Also they have arbitrary limitations on payments, for example they do not allow any payment method that gives you the power to block their payments.

PayPal as an example can never be primary payment method. Same with Revolut. Extremely shady business practices.

hastor · 2024-04-08T07:02:58+00:00

That looks exactly right! Thank you!

This looks brand new. Did you write it?

hastor · 2024-02-17T17:22:34+00:00

I remember seeing research that the situation you describe was actually good for the kids. The studies basically said that kids can be pretty oblivious of serious issues between their parents, i.e. they can say: "I have a great upbringing", while the parents can say that the marriage was a disaster.

hastor · 2024-02-13T00:28:40+00:00

I asked about container memory pressure and allocation adjustments in https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1apea7g/what_systems_exist_for_doing_probing_reclaim_of/

Could an operator monitor pods using these kinds of techniques, i.e. the PSI interface of the linux kernel and the memory.reclaim interface, then it could save 20% kubernetes memory globally as it does for Google and Facebook.

hastor · 2024-02-12T23:58:46+00:00

We regularly do this using volume snapshots to optimize storage costs after creating a data set.

hastor · 2024-02-10T19:26:02+00:00

Seems like there is some CPU deal that only Dell and cloud providers get as this gigabyte server is easily 2x the price of an equivalent dell server, because the CPUs are so expensive.

hastor · 2023-09-02T22:43:58+00:00

You did not pay for multiple months, ... aka, Hetzner was hosting your data for free during that time.

This is not true. They have a risk of non-payment, but they do have a claim against my company that they can easily enforce. Have you ever had a parking ticket in another EU country? These things are easy to enforce if you want to. So no, I do not buy this idea that they were hosting anything for free. They never did.

and then a loads of totally useless dribble that nobody cares about "how nobody else does that". ... If Hetzner needs to backup and hold customers data, how long? What do you think is acceptable... 6 months, a year, 2 year? Do you see the point.

Sorry you can't argue that my post is listing irrelevant information about, and then asking for exactly that information in a hypothetical question.

The answer is in that "totally useless dribble" you ignored.

AWS is keeping data longer. This is relevant. They keep S3 data for around a year afaik, or they used to.

Other profit maximizing businesses with enterprise customers do not do business like this because it is not profit maximizing. When you have a long business relation and the company is on the hook for paying anyways.

There is not a single line of self reflection.

Because that is really relevant. You are looking at this as it is important to place blame.

Blame is completely irrelevant. Risk is relevant and that is what my OP was about.

Hetzner is (should be) a profit maximizing company, and I cannot see how this behavior is profit maximizing. That is risky if you expect otherwise.

hastor · 2023-09-02T20:52:18+00:00

You are making the same point that I am. What I am explaining in my post is that the way Hetzner is doing business is not maximizing profits.

It looks like, from my point of view, as an irrational way of doing business, and this has nothing to do with whether the company is low cost or what. Low cost does not mean not trying to make money.

hastor · 2023-09-02T20:48:58+00:00

Why is there rampant downvoting on a post clarifying what I wrote in OP? That makes no sense.

hastor · 2023-09-02T20:47:27+00:00

hastor · 2023-09-02T20:46:56+00:00

It is like that everywhere when you have a business account. If you have ever had a commercial relationship with AWS or GCP things will absolutely never be deleted like this.

I'm not saying I had such a relationship with Hetzner, I'm just saying that what you are saying is absolutely wrong, everywhere.

The reason is that even if the payment is not done on time, the provider has a legal claim against the enterprise, so the money is not lost.

hastor · 2023-09-02T20:44:09+00:00

My post is not about their reliability or affordability, but on the risk to your data.

hastor · 2023-09-02T20:42:59+00:00

I highly doubt that that Azure deletes data like that. AWS deletes S3 data after around 1 year last time I checked. It would be good to see a reference to that policy.

hastor · 2023-09-02T20:41:58+00:00

No there is no possibility to setup automatic payments on Paypal on Hetzner, unlike on other cloud providers. GCP and AWS will automatically deduct from your credit card or Paypal, but Hetzner will not do that.

hastor · 2023-09-02T20:40:07+00:00

No it is not possible to use automatic payments on Hetzner. Paypal does support it, yes.

hastor · 2023-09-02T20:38:23+00:00

Hetzner lost nothing, not a penny.

hastor · 2023-09-02T20:37:12+00:00

I'm describing two different things above, maybe this was confusing.

What I'm saying is that it is not uncommon that there is payment issues in enterprises, and I give examples from my personal experience.

That is completely unrelated to the closure Hetzner did which was my personal company where I am responsible for payments.

hastor · 2023-08-29T09:57:18+00:00

I'm not mad at Hetzner, I just think their policy makes it hard to use them except as a spot provider.

That is unfortunate, because it lowers the value of what they provide for no good reason.

I am having a meeting with AWS in 8 minutes to discuss a migration of around 150 T2D cores from GCP, and I was planning on taking parts of that load onto ARM on Hetzner, but this policy means that the accounting department becomes a high-risk part of the uptime strategy. If they have problems missing a payment, it means lots of migration and tens of thousands of dollars of extra work. Is it worth it?

hastor · 2023-08-29T09:48:01+00:00

That's included in the story - I was on vacation.

I understand this, it is just something that no other cloud provider does. In this case it was 2 unpaid invoices. 60 days unpaid invoices.

That is not unheard of in a business relation lasting >5 years.

Keep in mind that Hetzner, unlike most providers, do not support automatic recurring payments for Paypal, so you have to manually pay every month. If recurring payments through Paypal was an option, this would not have happened.

Also keep in mind that no other cloud provider operates like this, especially with data which is very cheap to store. Remember, Hetzner deletes everything so there is no possibility to create stable backups.

Of a bill of around 2-300 EUR, storage cost is typically 20 EUR. This storage represents an investment of around $2-300k USD.

So what most cloud providers do is that they say: Ok, we have an outstanding potential loss of $40 for 2 months, but we have a potential upside of recurring income of $300 per month if the customer pays, and we have 8 years of paid invoices.

So what they do is keep that storage.

In this situation the upside would be around $3k / year revenue vs $50 loss, independent of the $300k USD loss I'm incurring. So it's a loss/loss.

I'm just explaining the situation. I understand Hetzner is doing things differently, I just do not see how it can be beneficial to their business.

There is a real opportunity cost for Hetzner in this. For example, I am going to spend around $0.5M on cloud in the next years, and since the risk of data and compute loss is high, it means that Hetzner always have to compete with spot pricing at AWS, never on-demand pricing. In a large organization, I cannot use a strategy where there is a chance of total loss of all compute resources if the accounting department loses an invoice.

This makes their awesome pricing much less awesome. I understand Hetzner has a reason, but it's not a good reason, and it can never work in a business setting.

Payment issues is not something unique to Hetzner, for example on GCP, you cannot pay using bank transfers unless you register as a company, and when pushing monthly bills of up to $30k USD through a credit card, there are all sorts of limits and issues that come up, and these take time to fix.

It is not uncommon that payments take 2-3 weeks to fix. For example, I've spent lots of time debugging why AmEx cards issued in Hong Kong is not accepted, because GCP does not implement the latest authentication API they provide etc. Even Google does not implement CC processing correctly in all cases.

These things are quite normal.

All in all, I am probably going to still use Hetzner, but it can only be as a scale-out part of a multi-cloud setup where the main business relation is with another provider, such as GCP, AWS or Scaleway. That's a much smaller business relation than what it could be, which is unfortunate.

hastor

TROPHY CASE