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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

The top reply is from Vercel:

> Hey Thomas. Your paywall-bypassing site broke our ToS and created hundreds of hours of support time spent on all the outreach from the impacted businesses. > Our support team reached out to you on Oct 14th to let you know this was unsustainable and to try to work with you.

The poster immediately misunderstood them and thought the hundreds of hours were for talking to him. But they also sounded reasonable afterwards.

> I’ve received 4 emails from vercel support in 2023, I don’t think that constitutes hundreds of hours of work > But tbf I get it if you want to be an opinionated hosting provider and not host 12ft. No worries here, just restore my other projects and give me my domains back and we chill

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A couple of platform providers have burned me so bad that I will absolutely move my business and tell others about my bad experiences.

In 2008, GoDaddy let an associate transfer StrategyWiki.org and a bunch of other domains out of my account while I was on a college trip with no internet. I'd spent half a decade building up these projects, and they were stolen away without my knowledge. GoDaddy offered no recourse or apology. The guy that performed the heist was 15 years my senior and from a family of lawyers, which he absolutely threatened me with if I tried to fight him. Even though GoDaddy ownership has changed, I do not like them to this day.

Over the past few years, I maintained a personal Netlify account for hosting a bunch of personal websites. When I started building my startup on Netlify, they moved my personal websites out of their free tier (despite them being in a different account) and into a paid plan. They started charging my card (which I wasn't aware of), and when I changed my billing info they deleted my websites entirely. There was no option to restore them, and their support was incredibly rude. They kept telling me what I had to do to undo their mistake without offering to do it themselves.

Netlify is horrible. Rude and unhelpful.

I was just about to move over to Vercel, but if they're no better than Netlify, I may as well stay put.

If Vercel is working for the "impacted businesses" so much then why aren't they charging them for the hours worked entrenching their market position and busting their business model critics? Why send the bill for that time to him if it's not in ultimate service of him? He rightly sees through their incorrect billing stance. Seems like Vercel takes sides in every industry so you better hope your business has no impact on any other if you go with them.

We need little guys out there correcting the record of these "elusive content" publishers trying to claim exclusive access is all they offer when moments before it was available for free to anyone listening. He just proves they value bot access more than human audience. Maybe he does to, maybe he only wants bots to access his website. Vercel says no, only big business can get away with that freedom to choose one's audience makeup.

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