First of all: thanks for such a great platform with lots of fantastic tools and the support for JAMStack!
I’m the creator of the open-source Nord project (GitHub repository), a relatively large project when measured by users, downloads, spreading across the www, bundling in other projects or stats like issues & PRs that could keep me busy for multiple years when I’d start to work on OSS full-time.
I wanted to mention this because this is part of the root cause for my problem: last month the project website exceeded the 100GB free bandwidth for the first time without me noticing it directly. The site was hit more frequently due to some more mentions across the web as usual, e.g. blog posts or publications on popular sites like HN (Hacker News), as the “winter time” is the reason why people start to watch out for “winterly” color themes.
Anyway, recently I started to get daily emails about an impending account suspension if I don’t add a payment method to my Netlify account to pay for the 55$ extra bandwidth package. This package was activated for my account without asking for confirmation which is, in my opinion, a no-go from a business perspective how to deal with customers! Sure, providing “free plans/tiers” is not something to be taken for granted and I’m very grateful that Netlify does and continue to do so, even after the company has grown, but automatically charging customers when they hit the free resources limits is anything but bad UX. I would had have been totally fine with pausing the service until the next payment circle starts, which resets the bandwidth, even when it means that my project site would have been down for some days. Now I’m left with a countdown for a permanent outage when not paying for this extra package from my personal wallet for a project that can be used by everyone for free while I even “pay” with a lot of lifeblood and free time to keep it running. I’ve been active in OSS 14+ years, so I know this feeling, but spending my personal money is a step I won’t go. There are some GitHub sponsors for my projects, but that’s not even remotely enough to cover the 55$ bill and these are meant to sponsor me in the first place.
Long story short: The countdown says “19 days” at the time of writing this and I notice the pressure that weighs on me right now to try to prevent the website and DNS to disappear into the abyss. I already roughly planned to migrate both to my personal Kubernetes clusters, but this is a “last resort plan” when everything goes wrong. I don’t want to miss many of the great Netlify features, including the CDN that makes sure everyone world-wide is able to use the website as fast as possible and not having to connect to my personal root-servers in Germany.
With that said, I’d like to escalate this topic to the Netlify support team in order to find a solution as fast as possible that makes both sides happy.
And yes, I’ve read the corresponding documentations about account suspension, billing (including FAQs and the pinned post in this forum) so I’m aware that this was documented somewhere, but not really highlighted really well during the first setup of my website.
When it is possible to quickly upgrade my account to Netify’s open source plan (subtracting the bandwidth from last month from the 1TB of December) I’d happily add the required reference link/badge to my website to solve this problem.
Please let me know if you need any additional information. I signed into this forum using my netlify account to I guess it should be easy for the support team to get my information like account ID etc.