It reminds me of that Albert Brooks movie where he goes to Vegas with his wife and she gambles away all of their life savings. He tries to convince the casinos to give him a refund because of the good publicity it would create. The casino replies with something like "If we give you a refund, everyone will come in asking for a refund and then where would they be?"
It's an interesting line to walk. If they give the poster a refund and he posts goodwill posts about it on Hacker News, Twitter, etc. Then, next thing you know, every customer who isn't using all of their capacity is asking for refunds and if they don't give them, then the PR backlash will be even worse (think AT&T and the free micro cells they're giving to some of their best customers but not others).
I'm guessing the majority of their profits come from people who don't use their full metered capacity -- in the same way giftcard profits come from people who never redeem them. Of course a google-like model that provides traffic-based metering would be best.
> I'm guessing the majority of their profits come from people who don't use their full metered capacity
For Herokus sake I hope that that is not the case.
Typically a service like this is 'oversubscribed' to about 10 to 15%, it's like pre-paying for your parking meter, you want to pay a little bit too much because of the uncertainty in when you'll get back to the meter but not so much that you'd be cheaper off parking somewhere for a flat rate fee.
If they really do make the majority of their money on unused instances then they're setting themselves up for trouble in the longer term.
I highly doubt they did not think that one through.
It's an interesting line to walk. If they give the poster a refund and he posts goodwill posts about it on Hacker News, Twitter, etc. Then, next thing you know, every customer who isn't using all of their capacity is asking for refunds and if they don't give them, then the PR backlash will be even worse (think AT&T and the free micro cells they're giving to some of their best customers but not others).
I'm guessing the majority of their profits come from people who don't use their full metered capacity -- in the same way giftcard profits come from people who never redeem them. Of course a google-like model that provides traffic-based metering would be best.