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Our experience with aurologic: fair warning if you're a customer
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I think this matter has to be dealt with in the legal system. This isn’t LowEndLawyers. Good luck with the impending judicial brawl, although I anticipate it will end with a settlement.
Maybe for the future, hire a lawyer to review the contract terms from a German provider before signing on any dotted lines.
I did talk to a few lawyers (I’m from Germany too), and they told me that the aurologic terms are invalid — the cancellation terms were unclear, and the alleged 12-month auto-renewal was neither properly communicated nor verifiable at the time of signup.
Anyways, as I already mentioned, aurologic has already dragged this to court.
Go get that bag diva!! sue for $6 billion
If that's the case then sit back and let your lawyers do the dirty work in a court of law. I don't want to sound rude but arguing your case here isn't going to move the legal situation; it has to be done in a judicial setting. Hopefully the judgment comes in your favor after all is said and done.
It is a good warning to everyone else to always read the fine print... and if thousands of dollars are on the line, then to keep printed copies of the fine print (or use archive.is or similar to archive them before they are changed under the rug).
Based on my lawyer skills I obtained thru ChatGPT. B2B transactions screws you in the ass as they are more relaxed than B2C.
Simply, 12 months contract which auto renews after 12 months is legal. Only IF the contract signed (or ToS or whatever) states that the contract auto renews itself after 12 months.
And 90 days is standard cancellation notice period for 12 months contract, nothing surprising about it.
So if contract is due to end on 31.12.2025 then you need to give cancellation notice by 30.09.2025 else it auto extends.
Only thing OP can do here if he can prove that there was no auto renewal condition in ToS. Else he is fucked.
And thanks for reminding me to not doing business with a German company even as B2C.
I didn't post this to argue my case here. I just wanted to make others aware on aurologic's behaviour.
@AS203446 I believe the main issue here is the business term conditions between B2C and B2B customers. Legally, a company needs to let their customer (B2C) that they are getting into rolling 12 months contract. But according to German laws this is not mandatory for B2B trades.
Also @jh_aurologic as you call your customer a kid, do you make kid discount at his bills or do you charge him as an adult? If you charge him with adult prices, then you should treat him like one.
And, giving away information about your customer, his name and age is not cool and unrelated, you shouldn’t spread around your customers’ PII, it’s against the laws.
Public info. Reguards.
That’s not entirely correct. Whether the customer is B2C or B2B, the company must clearly inform them if they’re entering into a 12-month contract with automatic renewal.
The key difference for B2C customers is that you cannot simply include a clause in the terms and conditions stating that the contract will renew automatically for another 12 months — so-called “silent renewal” clauses are generally invalid under consumer protection law.
In this case, aurologic’s original order form did not mention any automatic 12-month renewal. That clause was only added later. Yet this modified version is what aurologic submitted to the debt collection agency — effectively misrepresenting the original agreement.
Hey ChatGPT, reguards.
I was too lazy to look up the consumer protection laws
Hi,
this goes basically for both of you @AS203446 and @jh_aurologic
I have some ( actually unfortunately quiet some more ) real life experience with this kind of stuff.
And it boils down to this:
IF @AS203446 can proof that in the clientarea a renewal term of 1 month was showing THEN @jh_aurologic would have to proof that an information, informing the customer that its 12 months renewal, was received by the customer.
If either side can not, the case will be lost, except that the so called AGB ( the general terms of service ) state a 12 month or 1 month renewal term. Courts will go after:
exactly in this priority line.
An information in a clientarea is nice. And if we would be talking about B2C relations, the customer would have a point here. But between B2B this information in the clientarea has a very low power to be part of the contract. Its just like how ( at least german ) courts handle such information.
And by the way, a renewal term is not a billing term. Thats obviously nonsense ( no offense here ). A cat is just no dog. Cant help it.
Aside of this:
Means usually:
Means if a contract goes until 31th december and you want to cancel it for 1st febuary, then you would have to send your cancellation already on 1st november to be in 3 months ( november, december, january ) out of the contract.
This is actually not too much exotic. Its quiet normal to have longer cancellation notice periods.
If you want to sue someone at court you will have anyway to proof everything. So to send a copy of the AGB or contract or what ever contract related from the point in time when the deal was made, should not be a problem actually. So it can be done for the customer to avoid this court hassle.
I read something about git and contract and commits. If i did not missread it or simply have hallucinations then please please please, tell me when you have the 1st court meeting!
I really want to see the face of the judge if you start talking about git commits ( no offense here, i mean it really serious ). I had already quiet a lot of all kind of judges and seen quiet some funny stuff. Proofing by handwritten what ever, sms messages, witness or verbal what ever, all fine! Maybe not easy to use that as proof, but the judge will know that.
But git commits... never heard of that.
Honestly, if i were you, you should definitely make a deal.
@AS203446 was either way too late with the cancellation as it seems ( ignored the 90 days ) and @jh_aurologic might have here some issues proofing what was agreed on or not.
You both have the risk of a fail / loosing here ( at least partly ) i think, and maybe its more realistic than you might think.
This is not meant to side with anyone here, just sharing my experience and hopefully saving you both your money in lawyers, court and expert_witness stuff.
If we talk here about some thousands of EUR, then the chance is quiet high at some shit will happen ( for both of you ) and at the end of the day the lawyer, courts, everyone will get money but you two, especially if you consider time, effort, annoyance will be on the loosing side.
This whole story might just not be worth the hassle and maybe its better to call it a day, making a deal and parting ways.
Good luck to both of you!
And as a little disclaimer ( in german, just in case ;-) )
Mein Post stellt keine anwaltliche Beratung dar und spiegelt ledeglich meine persoenlichen Erfahrungen wieder!
I‘d call this attempt rather a pragmatic nice way to avoid being unfriendly, but you dont know me though:)
Is the value over 21k€ and Crypto?
I wouldn't say I was too late.
The terms state that the contract has a minimum term of 12 months.
If the contract is not cancelled 90 days prior to the end of the 12 month term, it will renew on a month month basis.
I cancelled on December 24th 2024. How is a 90 day renewal possible in that case?
How can I cancel a contract 90 days prior with a 1 month term?
The MRC was 1428 EUR including tax, so if aurologic continues to send invoices until October 2024, we'll end up with around 13.000 EUR in October.
To make this clear: I am not suing aurologic.
As @AS203446 didn't actually put pen to paper on a contract, I'd deem this pointless. B2C fine but as Alexander is a Einzelunternehmen it's B2B so I'd say a webpage TOS/AGB is pretty useless here.
And @jh_aurologic, your 30yo ass won't get anywhere by lashing out calling your customers kids. He's a company, who was a former customer, treat them both equally as they have benefitted you monetarily in some way. Acting inappropriately in public just makes people look down at you and your company. Maybe fix the cooling in Tornado and keep your customers instead of wasting your time on LowEndTalk and playfighting with dumbfounded words.
No vegetables involved
It's pretty sad that aurologic thinks I was planning an exit scam or planning my T1 only strategy. (Which I didn't)
Imagine a customer that signed the contract 5 years ago and logs into the customer portal, notices the terms and cancels the contract in good faith, only to be met with this argumentation
Well, it seems to not be that clear whether the "90 days prior" relate to (only) the initial 12 months or also to the time after that that is, to the monthly renewals. Btw, even if the latter, I don't see a problem there as renewal periods and cancellation period are different things and AFAIK the law has no problem with one being longer than the other no matter which (although normal people might think that cancellation period must be < renewal period).
Btw. I think you would be on the safe side if you accepted @aurologic's good will offer of "only" 3 more months, based on the assumption that, OK, having canceled on Dec 24th 2024 the earliest end of contract would be April 1st 2025/last day of March.
(And yes, sorry but the three months cancellation period was clear and it was your fault to not cancel at end of September at the latest).
§ 309 Nr. 9 BGB — Laufzeit und Kündigung von Dauerschuldverhältnissen (Contract duration and termination for continuing obligations)
May or may not help you here as an Einzelunternehmer
I thought I was the only one. Every billing or contract problem I've ever had was with a German provider who had convoluted contract terms.
I assumed that the 90 days relate to the initial 12 month term. To be honest, aurologic's terms leave a lot of room for speculation.
I talked to a few lawyers and they all confirmed that the court is going to rule in my favour, based on aurologic's explanation.
i agree with jsg, you should pay the 90days.
well hopefully it all works out.
Hi,
i can fully understand your point of view as this is a bit contradicting things.
On one hand the term is 1 month, on the other hand, the cancellation time is > 1 month.
Obviously not really fitting.
And yes, you are right, its not fitting. Actually, if you want to put it that way, its just another sign that this 1 month is actually a false information. This actually supports that the contract might have been renewed for 12 months. I did not really want to mention stuff like this as its basically giving ammunition to a party and i dont want to side here with anyone.
But even if it would be 1 month and a bit contradicting, still this 90 days would have as much "power" in the contract as the 1 month. This whole thing leaves quiet some space for interpretation. And the court will interpret it. No one knows what will come out of that. Could be for both sides a double edges sword.
This is really not for you and definitely also not for the other party a safe game in my humble opinion. Really not.
Both of you should really think about if you want to take this interpretation risk.
Well its obvious that you wont sue someone who wants money from you and you just want to have your peace ;-)
If its 1.4k with 19% tax ( assuming 19% ), then of course the amount wont be 13k but less. You dont sue taxes in germany in B2B.
And from this amount @jh_aurologic will have to reduce something because what ever service you get from them, their own expenses ( which they wont have if you dont consume the service ) will hardly be 0. So they would have to reduce it and to proof why its only reduced by X and not X-Y. Same if they dont do any reduction. Again, space for interpretation and free judgement of the court.... on the other side, IF aurologic could proof that they made contracts with 3rd parties ( that must be fullfilled ) BECAUSE of you THEN of course the shit_level for you would rise again. And that must be also proofed. And of course you can at all this points work against it.
Please make a deal, both of you.... i really dont like lawyers getting even more rich ^^;
Edit: You can PM me what exactly you bought from them. If its IP transit, maybe we can use it, depending on the deal. So maybe we could take it over as we anyway need to extend the capacities
((
I guess it depends on the service but this just reads a lot like big mobile networks cutting customers off (often over late payments) and then expecting them to pay the remainder of a contract.
Is your service still active? Is it a service that you can not use therefore making it really easy to prove to a court it's vindictive? If not, then it will be an issue because they will argue you're in breach of the contract through non payment as they've supplied the services. It's a lot harder to make a claim against someone when it didn't cost you anything and is opportunistic, of course.
I offered to pay one additional month: this has been rejected. I do not agree to pay three months, as you have already mentioned, aurologic would have to reduce the amount since their expenses are much much lower if I don't use the service anymore.
After the first 12 months, the contract was supposed to renew month by month.
But aurologic is saying that I had to cancel 90 days in advance, even after the contract switched to monthly renewal.
This creates a contradiction. If the renewal is monthly, you should be able to cancel monthly too. Otherwise, the contract traps you. It renews every month, but you can never leave.
I cancelled in December 2024. That was after the 12-month term ended, and more than enough time to cancel a monthly contract. So the cancellation should be valid as of January 31, 2025.
Again, a court has to decide this and since aurologic has already dragged this to court, the only two options are:
We are dealing with @mxmla and @heartbeat_IT .
Shall we worry?
They can't charge us though as the billing agreement has been deleted.
Once the aff money runs out, the server would be canceled.
The service I had was IP-Transit. It's still active in the customer portal, the cross connect is being used for a different customer. So I could still use the service, but I don't know if the BGP config is still active on aurologic's side.
Hi,
i am sorry, but your conclusion will most probably backfire.
In best case you have here a contradiction. 1 month vs 90 days.
Because both are written there, they are both equal in power. So if either party will say its invalid, the court will check if either rule has more power / priority ( 1 month or 90 days ).
As it seems, and the way the words are put, this is not the case.
If contradicting rules of same power are present in a contract, then the court will start interpreting what was truly meant and wanted by both parties at the time the contract was agreed on. For this interpretation the court will check the other rules in the contract, will check the AGB's ( if they became a valid part of the contract ) and will check the nature of the deal ( what is actually common in similar deals in general in this field ).
And sorry to say, but monthly contracts are highly uncommon in datacenter B2B contracts.
Again, if this is B2C, things would be entirely different.
But here 2 business entities making a contract for IP transit, datacenter services, what ever in this kind of things i assume. And i am doing this business since 2003 and i can hardly remember any contract i ever had with a carrier or a datacenter that was with 1 month renewal. So this 1 month IS uncommon. Its just like that. And if its uncommon and if there are contradicting things, then the court will assume that you as adult business people will have had agreed to something that is common. -- And that wont be your 1 month most probably.
Dont get me wrong, i was also 22 years old long long time ago. And i also had legal issues, because i was just a bloody noob.
It took me 10 years ( no joke ) to fight my ass through, ending up with the court telling me that i was right. But because my lawyers f*** it up, the court did not agree with the money i wanted from the datacenter ( that sued me actually, not i them ) as reimburstment.
Pure interpretation of the court met pure stupidity of my lawyers ending up in the fact that i had to pay to the datacenter something ( after 10 years the amount had plain > doubled ).
Later i sue the lawyers and got back a part of the money at least.
But the point in the story is: Even you might be right, you can still loose.
That goes for both of you parties.... with this kind of combination... contradicting stuff, contracts in git repositories, the fact that in general if rules in contracts are unclear/missleading or giving space for interpretation, courts tend to blame the one who use/made it -- in your case the provider, not the customer -- and might interpret things in the favor of the customer -- especially if its a 22 years old/young sole entrepreneur customer vs. a GmbH ( company with limited liability, usually assuming the more "adult" ) one.
So you both should really really think about if you really want and need this shitshow that might potentially wait for you. Maybe meeting somewhere in the middle of the 3 months or where ever around this will be better for both of you if you consider what you can potentially loose or gain if you win or loose this court stuff.
For @jh_aurologic its easy and no problem to take back his sue. Will have minimal court cost. The other question is the lawyer expenses....
Anyway, i wrote what i wanted to write. Maybe you will find a way out, maybe not.
I hope you can handle it better than doing this with a court.
Good luck to both of you!