Hey folks - Greg here, I do product at Blacksmith.

I want to say upfront - we've never pursued these invoices. If someone feels they didn't get value from the service, we've eaten that cost and always will.

There's a bit of an implicit policy decision on our side here that we did a bad job of communicating - I want to clarify that, and then talk about how we can fix it.

First, we wanted to let customers start using Blacksmith without a credit card. Very few infra startups do this today - CC validation is great for anti-abuse - but doing so has let us support a much greater number of free users.

Many of these free users have turned into full OSS sponsorships (most recently ccusage, and before that, OpenClaw) or large paying accounts, and we haven't wanted to cut those users off from trying us. It's a real pain point to find a credit card to put down for your company or OSS project's CI spend before you've even tried the service.

Second, not having a credit card on file means we don't actually know when credit card-less users intend to continue past their free trial.

Shutting down users CI workloads entirely seemed harsh, especially because doing so would fail builds and require a code change to resolve. If users could start without a credit card, we weren't going to then hold their runners hostage. Instead, we decided to just eat the cost for the small number of users who either abused our services or did not actually mean to use the service.

This worked, mostly - though every month we have gotten a number of support cases with users confused about their invoice. If they didn't intend to use the service past the free tier, we've voided out the invoice, and often given credits against a future bill if they intended to use the service, but were surprised by the behavior.

We have a lot to improve about our billing mechanics - but because our retention rate for these users has been so high, we have assumed great support could catch and resolve the ambiguity.

That said, there's two changes we can make now:

1. we clearly missed the mark on supporting this specific case - we should have offered to void this bill entirely given the surprise factor here.

2. We're prioritizing up making progress on a Wallet implementation that will let folks choose to suspend their runners rather than let them continue to run after they use up their free tier.

We also just launched a new billing/metrics view so users have better visibility into their free tier and Blacksmith usage.

I'm sorry for the bad taste this has left in everyone's mouth - I'll be hanging out here and on greg [at] blacksmith [dot] sh if you want to talk about your account specifically.

Surprise, pay $1000