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Comment by bitemix | Hacker News Reader

$9.99? This is why most people offer an enterprise plan.

I'm surprised OFA thought it'd work at their scale at that price point. I'd definitely be cautious and offer to pay more if I was their procurement officer. It could definitely ruin your night.

The blogpost says that OFA contacted them and forewarned about the size of the call. I guess that's the point where Mixlr could have asked an extra to handle the scale, while it sounds like they just said "no problems, go ahead".

Right, I was implying that even after they said 'no problems, go ahead' (perhaps by opening the discussion about an enterprise plan). My reasoning is because it makes it easier to shift blame for the procurement officer. In the event of a service failure instead of being picked on for hosting a presidential conference for the price of a chipotle, you can blame the company you paid a good amount of money to for their crappy service. Anyhow, glad everything worked out and I'm sure they made up for it in marketing.

I see. I reckon it doesn't work either way. Think of how wonderful would have been to run a flawless presidential conference call with $9.99, instead of, for instance, procuring a custom-made IBM+Cisco contract for $200k.

Maybe there's a number in the middle, but I think it's hard to draw a line. At the end of the day, if I were a US citizen, I would prefer my government to attempt with a $9.99 service that went almost flawlessly, rather than ditch it just because "it's cheap, it can't work, we must pay at least $X".

Although they're private and won't be paying using tax payer money, I agree and kudos to them. I was just addressing the risks associated with such a thing.

I agree, nonetheless it's something the mixlr team will learn from and adjust their sails accordingly.

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