alt Hacker NewsIf I pay anything for a service, I expect a refund if that service doesn't work.
Best would be a free week/month for anyone who sent a request during the downtime.
Replies
If you pay anything for a service you expect a refund on the order of hundreds of hours of credit (168 in a week) for every hour of downtime?
I’d be happy with just some credits.
Enough to offset any KV cache miss expenses is the absolute minimum.
The smart play is to refund customers something like $20-50 worth of unsubsidized credits.
Those are high margin and only the equivalent of 45 minutes of Fable usage once the KV cache reload costs are factored in.
Yet customers often need a few credits to finish a job without waiting 5 hours or days for their reset.
Keep in mind openAI already gives me free resets I can use when I want which are very useful to me. Seems a no brainer to tack those to subscriptions, actually.
It gives the user a little more flexibility, a little more control over their tools.
What you expect is irrelevant.
So many companies have shitloads of downtime and do not compensate. Usually they blame you if they can.
Are you crazy? Do you realize how much use they allow under a subscription already? I’m going through $200-400 in tokens per day on a $200/month subscription. Nobody has ever said anything, throttled me, encouraged me to go to API pricing, etc.
I wish it didn’t go down so frequently, but it does. Still, I get an enormous amount of value. I realize they probably prioritize API users over subscribers and I’m ok with that. I use the API and openrouter for the things that need to be resilient to outages.
I would be embarrassed to try to ask for a refund or free credits. They already give credits far in excess of what you pay for and you have practically the entire month to use them outside of a couple hours of downtime.
Not that it wouldn’t be a nice gesture but what did you agree when you bought the service? What’s the SLA? What’s the compensation model, service credits? Do you have anything like “for 1h downtime you get 2h for free”?
When you miss 1h of your job, do you give back a month for free?
> Best would be a free week/month for anyone who sent a request during the downtime
This is bizarrely out of touch. It would be a courtesy but it's not a "reasonable expectation" at all.
At best you could maybe reasonably expect a prorated refund for the time of unavailability, but then Fable was still available.