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@Francisco
ahem, I may or may not have created this....
https://www.enjen.net/amazingcat/
Really all you had to do was host that on DO and send me a link, instant credit.
Now, you're making me laugh, Jar
I'm sure DO will find a way to "expire" such dormant account paid-in credit, in-house, using exactly the same shady bookkeeping (mind you, Jar, your words, not mine) used to expire equally valid free credit. You see, on the books, there is no difference between the two types of credit until one day, when DO arbitrarily rules to invalidate part of their liabilities. Retroactively, no less! Good one! Sorry to be such a PITA, Jar, but can't help it, having a little accounting background, too 
Okay, more nonsense. How can you have any free credit left if you are not a dormant account? This nice little scheme of DO's is ONLY about dormant clients!
Same as with Rebel.com's arbitrary switch to auto-renewal of all clients' domains, DO has made a calculation here that most dormant clients will not bother with anything so uncomplicated as opening a ticket with a long unused provider, almost sure having forgotten their password and even login details. Classic bait and switch is what this is. And the best part is: anyone pissed here is absolutely of no consequence to DO (read: not a paying or potential client, nor liable to contest this in any way). Hence very little bad PR or any other downside
Also it is great that you offered the credits on the pack, thanks for it. shame ppl abused it tho.
But yea, on topic.
The 5$ you had to pay was obv to 'auth' people.
50$ + the 5$ you had to pay is enough to run the smallest droplet for 11 months, if its on 24/7 for the entire time. i see them meant to be used, to learn and to tinker. (I mean, it is on a student education pack afterall), i wouldnt expect them to be there in 5 years. its meant to be used, not hoarded.
althou, for the next time (if theres one, or just for experience) it could be mentioned somewere, either in the github page, or some extra info about the promotion
Ps. didnt read the whole topic, so these were prob posted already. also just my opinion
(Also can you confirm there was 100$ worth of credits at first? I swear i remember it, but it got changed before i got around activating it.)
Yeah the GitHub promo used to be $100. It was dropped down to $50.
You know, this.
DO offered credit. Lots used it. Lots abused it.
And when it goes away suddenly DO is evil. It would have been better if they'd never offered credits at all...?
I hope the Cure writes a song about how those evil DO people took all your tears and whipped them into a tasty smoothie and drank it while they line danced on your hearts.
Oohhhhh Jarland it doesn't matter what you say...I can't spend my credits from yesterday...Ohhhhh LET believe I never wanted it this way...
So. The Cure. Let me guess - you aren't in your twenties too?
Actually I have a couple of production servers with them and a bastion server. (Around $70 monthly).
I think I'm even older than you (gasp)
I, for one, cannot believe the audacity of Digital Ocean, what kind of business makes money by selling services instead of giving them away for free?
I would assume that 90% of all visitors here consider The Cure as a flash from a very distant past. If they even know who they are. Parents' music.
does digitalocean not respect all of the blood, sweat, and tears I spent earning those free credits?
It is, since I had to pay to get the "free" credits. That no longer makes them free but discounted IMO.
How you jump to all those conclusions is something I don't understand, but no worries: I will send a ticket. It takes a little more time to write that than to share my thoughts here.
Done, because I goofed on trying to move some stuff around. If it's a task for normal support (and what I'm asking is allowed), then let me know and I'll go through those channels.
Unfortunately this is an unfair analogy. A better would would be using a bank. If i put money in the bank and leave it there for 5 years and come back, my money damn well be there. If not, they have stolen my money. So, actually, my response to you is, YES, I would expect my money to still be in the account I put it in, even 20 or 50 years later (unless it was specifically outlined in the agreement I signed for the service, in which case this type of information should be made plainly obvious to the customer on sign-up).
I am guessing part of the plan here is to shed liability, which they created when providing tons of people free money(credit). In reality they are obliged to provide you with every penny they provided and the problem is if you can't anticipate when someone is going to use that credit, well you can dig your self a pretty deep hole of obligation.
Their plan to get around this was to say, "Hey, we like you and we are glad you utilized our promotion but now we are unable to sustain the amount of free credits and guarantee the hardware will be available to be utilized for said credits, so our plan instead of investing more in infrastructure, since there is a large portion of outstanding credit in our system, is to cancel all promotional credits so we don't have to retain this liability or invest more in potentially needed infrastructure to guarantee that liability."
While I appreciate them wanting to get away from their liability, because I bet if everyone at once started using all these credits at an unexpected time, they would run out of resources to provide the services, I still think this is the wrong way to go about this if you respect your customers. Their hope is a lot of these dormant accounts will let the money expire so they don't have to invest more in guaranteeing that availability of resources, thus showing larger profits and reduced costs.
I looked at my account and I think I have $30.00 in it, and the e-mail says May 1 only $4.xx would expire. So, for me I can probably burn 4$ before May 1 without an issue and it probably wouldn't matter if I lost that $4 either. However, if I was someone who spent a lot of time referring customers to DO for the referral credits or was someone who didn't have a lot of money (poor) and had taken advantage of the credits to be able to learn (and saved and spent my credit wisely), I would be furious too if I was told all the sudden I had to use up all my savings or you were going to take it from me. It seems DO just thinks we are all wealthy people and can afford to spend the extra money, when really, the common target of their product is young adults, teens and college students who already have small incomes wanting to test and learn about virtualization (thus the student packs with $50 or $100 credits being so widely utilized).
Bottom line, sure its a business decision, but this one was made with their VC investors and creditors in mind, not their customers. So really they are being very disingenuous in how they are explaining their reasoning, they should just tell people they messed up and gave away too much credit and need to cancel it instead of slipping in TOS changes and sending e-mails to people telling them, "Hey you didn't spend your money fast enough, so yeah, we are just gonna come take it back from you." and making customers freak out about losing their money. For them to take after spamming people and pushing them with the free credits in the first place and then to take them back later 'just because' is just poor business practice to start with. As stated before somewhere in this thread, this has bait and switch written all over it. Maybe one day when the law finally catches up to these internet businesses and starts enforcing the same rules and regulations we have for brick and mortar companies this type of thing will stop happening so much and hopefully, instead of getting away with it, these companies would end up with millions of dollars in fines for illegal business practices.
TL;DR:
I am not mad, because really it doesn't effect me much, however, I can see how and why a lot of people are. This was a poor business decision in my opinion and I am sure at the same time a rather intuitive chess move on their behalf (to help weed out the customer they want to keep and the freeloaders). This does not benefit the customer, only investors and seems a lot like bait and switch (Providing free credit and then taking it back before you can use it). Hopefully they will change their mind, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it!
my 2 cents.
Cheers!
One thanks button just isn't enough in some cases.
Completely agreed! Thanks @TheLinuxBug for the well-thought-out and detailed response.
Why pay when you can something for free forever?
Unfortunately, that is an unfair analogy. In this case, it's not your money. And DO is not a bank, regardless.
From what I read in this thread, it's not paid credits that are expiring, just the free credit that DO used to give away (like the Github student pack, promo credits, etc.)
So this is more like a case where you were given a gift card with an expiration date, and you didn't use it by that date. The company even emailed you to let you know that your credit would expire.
Yes, I know, the date wasn't printed on the gift card. OMG.
They may even have added the expiration date later. OMG.
It's a freakin' VM, not the last known protein in the universe. You got something for free. Why complain? This fist-pumping and pitchforks over injustice is just ridiculous.
Well. my 2 cents, the gift card wasn't 'given', there was an account activation top-up required to get it, income for DO that wouldn't have been there if not for the offer of perpetual credit.
A better analogy would be like joining a cinema club and paying them a joining fee based on a number of free cinema entries. If you only watch the occasional film, you would still reasonably expect to get free entry years down the line unless stated otherwise when you joined, after all you're not placing a burden on their seating by not coming very often.
You know what I like best about analogies on the internet? The better analogy that follows it. And the next better one. And the next better one. And so on. Loop it by 100 and it still has not become a real good analogy.
a whole 5 goddamn dollars
You know, analogies in the Internet are like GVH owners.
Yeah… peanuts. Not when multiplied by, say, maybe 50,000 dormant accounts, though… not a bad day's work for somebody at DO, eh?
Divided by the 50$ on each account that they possibly lost on people using their service, that they gave away for, technically, free.
Maybe it was their fault for trying to be nice, and trying to support students
is this why we cant have nice things?...
Not really. Their actual cost is a fraction of the $50 free credit actually used up by their customers. In fact, I expect that in the aggregate, even the minimum $5 added to each account in order to activate said free credit allowance, pretty much covered it. And good for them! They are a business, not a charity.
Let me clarify: all my posts in this thread are made in awe of DO, not criticism of any shady practices. Even if they did sail a little close to the wind, their operation as a whole is nothing short of genius and, in the aggregate, this trumps (pun intended
any accounting irregularities. My hat off. A future case study in MBA programs at top Business Schools, if I have ever seen one.
They were never trying to be nice. They're a business.
And the way I look at it now is that they made a bad business decision, regretted it, and are now trying to fix it with another bad business decision.
Every business makes mistakes, but only part of those businesses owns up to them and doesn't "hurt" the customer in trying to fix their mistake.