Absolutely absurd. I haven't touched it for 13 years, and just received an email that they will be billing me $31.25 with 6 hours warning. This, of course, is a few hours after an email saying that my "free subscription" will be expiring in a month, not within hours.
The kicker is that the billing FAQ 404s, the "account URL" 500s, and there is no apparent way to log in to the account that they are billing me for.
At this point the best I can do is hope they don't have any real PII to try to collect their bullshit bill.
I'd just ignore it out of principle. They won't have a CC on file and I never agreed to these terms. Good luck collecting since what they're doing isn't legal in pretty much any jurisdiction, and I reject the idea that I need to take action to not be billed.
It may or may not be defensible but chances are the terms of service you agreed to included a phrase that states they can make changes to those terms and you have to review them periodically or you’ll be deemed to have accepted them.
Luckily we live in "law is law" land and not "contract is law" land, and the law does take kindly to concepts like hotswapping concepts in a predatory manor.
Same here. It's was probably around 13 years as well, probably to try it out and never touched it since. My "account URL" shows 500 error as well. Here's the almost empty auto-reply if you reply to the email:
Hi,
Please reach out to the Fogbugz support team by visiting the following portal;
https://support.fogbugz.com/hc/en-us/
Thank you,
Fogbugz team.
If you poke around in the support articles they mention the cause of this: they also deleted all idle accounts without notice and depending on when you got hit by that, might not even be able to recover it. So they're trying to bill you for a service that they can't even provide.
It’s a terrible move, and everyone should ignore the email. (Obviously, not legal advice, just my personal opinion.)
I don’t recommend anyone do business with them, whether as a customer or anything else; I was CEO of Fog Creek when we decided to sell FogBugz, and if I knew the difference between what we were told ahead of the deal and what happened after, I never would have approved it. I didn’t see that they’d done this latest shitty thing until now but I really lament that they’ve sunk to an even lower new level.
to phrase it a little nicer; they may not have technically known but that would be due to naivety / willfull blindness that there is at least of possibility of something like this happening, but the payout was worth more than the downside risks to the decision makers who stood to benefit
I'm more concerned about them affecting my credit score... these clowns haven't a legal or moral leg to stand on but there's no way to cancel the free account that I haven't touched for 7 years. The hyperlink to my instance 500s and their support portal is either broken or disallowing new user registrations (despite me trying three browsers, two devices, and spending 10 minutes in the dev console manually enabling various buttons for password setting on the new account page and trying their ZenDesk URL instead of the custom one). Any emails to their customer success address tell users to log into this nonfunctional support portal.
Me writing this post is 10% commiseration and 90% documentation for if I have to talk to a court or credit bureau.
I recently noticed a collections agency sending emails that don't pass DKIM checks. Since the company's main business model is invoicing via email and their revenue is substantial, I'm positive it's malice, not incompetence. An intentional way of racking up late fees.
Great way to ruin the FogBugz brand and reputation: move everyone from free to paid tier without consent, and send out emails with a short notice telling them they will be charged $30/month - when most of these users haven't heard from/of them in over a decade. The flood of complaints is hilarious.
Honestly, I doubt the people who bought it care. It looks like some random company with some random stock photos that is just trying to extract as much money as possible.
Not the first time we've seen an acquirer completely screw up a brand in order to make more money.
I feel like the FogBugz reputation has been being ruined for at least 5 years now, probably closer to 10. They were just letting it languish, not making any improvements. We saw the writing on the wall ~3 years ago, and I spent a month migrating all of our FogBugz tickets and wiki content over to Jira+Confluence
FogBugz got bought out by a vulture capital style firm that fired everyone and outsourced everything. They're going to extract as much value as they can. The reputation doesn't matter if they can sucker enough people into paying for it.
> FogBugz got bought out by a vulture capital style firm that fired everyone and outsourced everything. They're going to extract as much value as they can. The reputation doesn't matter if they can sucker enough people into paying for it.
As I understanding, that's a the strategy of a lot of private equity: burn goodwill and turn it into cash.
Imagine the number of people who get this email on a user who left the company five years ago - and how many would just start paying assuming it’s some important part of something somewhere?
I got that e-mail too, on a decade-old test account: first an e-mail that reads like my account simply "expires" if I don't update. Then an invoice.
Here's what I don't get: After a stunt like this, any reputation/brand value that you might have had is gone. So, the obvious conclusion is they bought the company purely to pull this trick. Any other value the company might have had is deleted. Can that have been worth it? Very few people will pay voluntarily, I can't imagine them successfully collecting the money, and the acquisition price probably wasn't 0 either. I can't imagine that the math checks out, or does it?
Someone once told me that as recently as the late 2010s AOL was making millions of revenue off of old dialup accounts from the 90s that people just never cancelled and the cards just kept running. That's what they're probably shooting for here.
The expiry date of the credit card needs to be updated every couple of years. How can AOL keep charging a credit card if they don't have current information for it?
Very few of these 13 year old accounts are going to have valid card data on file, though. Any cards that were valid back then have long since expired. Seems to me that they're just spamming a bunch of people for no reason?
Dear <user>,
Thank you for contacting FogBugz Support. I understand that you have received a billing notice and do not want to be charged. You may be wondering why you have received this communication and wish to have your account deleted.
In the first place, please be rest assured that you will not be charged unless you have added a valid payment method to your account. The notification you have received is due to the recent changes to the FogBugz Base Subscription Model. Please accept our apologies for any misunderstanding this may have caused.
Additionally, be aware that your subscription will be automatically canceled and scheduled for deletion 30 days after the current billing period unless you add a valid payment method.
Finally, please be aware that trial accounts that were not active for a period of 9 months are automatically disabled, and will result in an Error 500 if you try to access the URL. These customers may have still received a notification despite not having an active account or a configured payment method.
Since there is no further action required from our end at this time, we will be marking this ticket as solved. That said, if still you have any other questions or concerns with which we may assist, please let us know, and we will be happy to help as required.
Thank you.
Best regards,
<NAME>
FogBugz Support Team
I had a hard time logging in to get in contact with them.
My fogbugz link (for which I should pay) returned 500 Internal Server Error, logging in Firefox didn't work, in Chrome it said that the password in invalid, and I didn't get a reset e-mail (tried twice), I've logged with Google credentials but I got a "This page doesn't exist" on a central-supportdesk.zendesk.com page.
So it sounds like grand incompetence rather than malice. Probably their automated mailer does not check whether the account is disabled or not. A junior dev is going to have a bad day.
I used to enjoy reading the "Joel on Software" blog in e.g. 2004, and that was around the time he/they were working on this product. I guess it's been sold on, perhaps many times, since, and I guess if the new owners are trying this then they don't have many/any actual real paying customers.
It seems such a shame. The blog (and presumably the product, although I never used it) was brimming with such optimism and confidence, "this is how you run a good business!" etc.
I bet Joel didn't envisage that product ending like this when he wrote all those articles. :(
… and it’s on you to fix it.
No idea what I’m talking about? Search Twitter for FogBugz - you’ll get it quick enough.
At some point in the past I had a trial for some product made by Fogcreek - we are talking 10 years back or so. The trial is long expired and forgotten about. Until today, that is, when I received an email purporting to charge $31 to my “prepaid account”.
I’ll remind you of a quote on your website:
> Our current customers are our only focus, and each should expect excellence from every aspect of IgniteTech. If at any time you believe we are falling short, the buck stops on my desk.
It’s on you to fix this, for everyone that got this, there are thousands of developers and business owners who got similar emails today. Perhaps your business model is intentionally to go invoice trolling, in which case my next email will be to the state AG. But I’m going to assume incompetence or inadvertence before malice and suggest that you address this quickly - perhaps on Twitter or a blog post.
I registered and have not logged in since 2012. This is what I got 12 hrs ago.
To me, It does not seem like they are charging me, seemingly because I never entered any billing data?
```
Dear cheesedudles,
Your current free subscription for FogBugz is expiring on October 16, 2022. To continue using FogBugz, please add payment details to your account today.
Because you're already a valued FogBugz user, we've automatically upgraded your account to include up to five individual users with your new paid subscription. Plus if you renew now, you qualify for 50% off any subscription tier, including the five-user license tier. Follow this link to upgrade your subscription plan now.
Trouble upgrading? Please create a ticket on our support portal support.fogbugz.com.
I got that too, but there's an email that gets sent 3 - 4 hours after that one. Look for "Your Manuscript Account" from "FogBugz Customer Success". Of course, any billing attempt won't succeed without updated payment info (unless their next step is to try to send it to collections....)
"Hi!
This email is to notify you that we will be charging $31.25 to your prepaid account (Account URL: [redacted]) on Sep 17, 2022 for the following services:
- Monthly discounted (50.00%) fee for FogBugz for up to 5 users for the period September 17, 2022 to October 17, 2022. - ($12.50)
- Monthly discounted (50.00%) fee for FogBugz-TimeTracking for up to 5 users for the period September 17, 2022 to October 17, 2022. - ($6.25)
- Monthly discounted (50.00%) fee for FogBugz-Wiki for up to 5 users for the period September 17, 2022 to October 17, 2022. - ($6.25)
- Monthly discounted (50.00%) fee for FogBugz-Agile for up to 5 users for the period September 17, 2022 to October 17, 2022. - ($6.25)
Once these charges have been processed, they will appear on your online statement, available here:
[unique URL redacted]
For more information on billing, see our FAQ here:
EDIT: Oh wow. Try clicking on that FAQ link. Or if you want to save a click, the ZenDesk reply says "Oops, this help center no longer exists. The company you're looking for is no longer using our help center."
Nothing is working. I thought that I'd be "nice" and login and cancel my account. Can't do that either, you just get a 500 errors from the sad Kiwi who now has to go live with his new evil masters.... Poor kiwi.
At least they haven't "upgraded" the 500 page kiwi – all the others have two mouths. Because they thought people wouldn't understand that a bird's beak is its mouth.
This should be illegal. I can understand raising the rates on existing paid plans automatically, if nothing else it's eventually reasonable for inflation purposes, but auto-converting from free to paid? No.
I suspect (IANAL) that in a sense, it already is, in that anybody testing this in court would deny the existence of any form of contract acceptance, and that would be the end of it.
It's probably legal to send messages like this, just like it's legal for ski slopes to have "We aren't at fault for anything" statements on every ticket. It's when they tried to enforce it that they'd find the law wasn't on their side.
It should be illegal to make claims that you know are not legally valid.
Of course this would be a horrible rule to enforce between the "the contract changes weren't run by legal" and "that line is enforceable in this outher jurisdiction that we operate in". But scaring average consumers with a massive contract and a line at the end "even if part of this contract is unenforceable the remaining clauses apply" is just abuse of people who don't have the legal power to actually test if the claims are valid and get screwed over.
Very often with contract law there is mostly no such thing as 'knowing a claim is not legally valid'. A lot of contract law is established by precedent, meaning in those cases nobody including the judge knew the enforceability of the issue before the judgement was written. Cases are also rarely identical examples of previous cases, meaning there can be an element of precedent setting even in cases that seem routine.
I don't think it should be illegal to have unenforceable clauses. Just ones that are known to be unenforceable. For example look at your average ISP out TV provider contract and there are a handful of these designed to prey on the public that doesn't know better.
It would definitely be difficult and messy to enforce, quite likely to messy to be feasible, but I would like to see some rule like this passed.
I don't think it matters if it's legal. If they succeed in charging anyone, most people will respond with chargebacks, which their bank will likely support, in this case.
The only case I can see them getting money is if someone actually is using FogBugz, and is willing to pay, in which case it's fine.
I would go further and say most people get away with bullshit, which is why human civilization finds itself slowing circling the drain like a turd in the toilet.
So I checked my email and I had two trial accounts in the past. Once in 2010, and once again in 2014 with a different email where I'd apparently forgotten I'd tried it out in 2010. Both said they were for on-demand trial accounts and would expire. I got a confirmation of the expiriation for the 2014 account and that email did not get this auto-upgrade email, but the 2010 one I got no confirmation of expiry and did get this auto-upgrade email. To be generous, maybe older trials weren't properly marked ended but this is still a pretty shit way to handle it.
(of course, the 2010 account gives a 500 error trying to open the management page and they asked me to provide billing details so it's probably not much more than a stub at this point).
Got one of these emails too. I haven't used the account in almost 10 years, they must have many thousands of these accounts that have been dormant forever and are now getting hit with "invoices" for services rendered. Looks like a real dick move, no thanks.
This is overt fraud, but borderline with subscriptions.
FIRST they requested users update payment information as if to continue their FREE accounts. THEN they billed users for a month's service.
It's called a "negative option" when the user has to do something to prevent additional charges. Normally that is illegal per US FTC (but legal in some countries). However, negative option contract terms ARE legal. That's when you agree initially e.g., with NYTimes that when your subscription is up, it automatically rolls over to paid tier X, putting the burden on you to cancel.
If, or since, most of these account agreements are 10+ years old, it's possible they ginned up some evidence of a negative option contract. It's almost certain no user has any information on the original terms of service. So then it's a question of who has the burden of proof, which leads me to wonder if there have been changes to that of late.
I hate to say it, but another option is that this company has been getting pushback or eviction from credit card issuers. This might be their way of imposing costs on them, to have to go through thousands of chargeback cycles, to spite the issuers pending their exit from the platform. It also might be a good way to get some cash from the issuers before declaring bankruptcy. Or, someone inside did this, on a Friday/Saturday, and they'll be gone before Monday with everyone's credit card information. Who knows?
To reiterate what others have reported:
9/17 title "Your Manuscript Account"
- $31.25 for:
- $12.50 9/17-10/17 5 users 50% off fogbugz
- $6.25 9/17-10/17 5 users 50% off time tracking
- $6.25 9/17-10/17 5 users 50% off wiki
- $6.25 9/17-10/17 5 users 50% off agile
9/16 title "Your fogbugz free subscription is expiring" (from a different sender)
"To continue using FogBugz, please add payment details to your account today"
(and if you didn't notice)
"Because you're already a valued FogBugz user, we've automatically upgraded your account to include up to five individual users with your new paid subscription"
Tried the same thing with Jumpcloud. Used it for a while. Disabled all users and moved on. 3 years (!!) later some debt collection lawyer contacts me about my $8000 bill. Wtf. Good luck collecting that.
This has got to be a bug no? Otherwise this is the most insane monetization attempt I've ever seen... there's no way any of these old accounts even have a valid payment method. Why even attempt this? So many questions...
I wonder if through some miscommunication (intentional or not) in the sale that these free accounts were thought to be active users. Reading the twitter and HN replies it's sounds like most of the free account users are people who tried it a decade ago and haven't touched it since. May be a big wake up call when 80% of their invoices bounce and 99.99% of the free accounts "dry up".
I'm a former FC employee who was around when the acquisition went down. It was definitely a drama at the time. One could possibly even say a debacle. But to be fair to Joel, he had long moved on from the company and was focused on Stack Overflow. The new (at the time) CEO of the company is a merciless, self-absorbed jerk who couldn't care less about the product, its customers, or the employees who got sold along with the product.
My first reaction on receiving this email was that is was a scam / phishing thing, then after checking that the URLs were genuine, I thought perhaps they'd been hacked somehow.
Good luck to them trying to charge me for a free account that I used for 1 week more than 10 years ago, I'm fascinated to see how this 'revenue hacking' strategy works for them.
FogBugz just sent out a retraction. Their intention was to retire the free service and offer the opportunity to upgrade to paid accounts at a 50% discount. If anyone was charged and didn't already receive a refund, the email to request a refund is fogbugzbilling@ignitetech.com.
Here's the beginning of their retraction email, in which they explain how this happened.
===
Dear FogBugz User,
Mea culpa — sincerely.
We’ve become well aware of the maelstrom of concern and comments caused by a series of emails that some of you received, but to explain, we were just as surprised as you when multiple emails were sent. Our original and only intended email, which was controlled by humans, was to inform you that the “free,” non-expiring version of FogBugz is being phased out on October 17, 2022. Additionally, we wanted to offer you the option to continue using FogBugz by updating your account to a paid subscription. This was the entire, planned effort.
However, once we updated the accounts that had been identified as free and non-expiring in the internal FogBugz accounting system, the software automatically generated a form email, notifying you that we had summarily converted you to a paid account, and worse, actually triggering collection/dunning notices to some. This was unintended and is not accurate. Yes, we’ve owned the software for some time and should know all of the nooks and crannies by now. We don’t know if this was a nook or a cranny, but it decided to act on its own. Truth. It’s embarrassing, and we’d react the same way as many of you have. So this email is to set the record straight.
We do not automatically charge any customer for usage of the software unless a subscription has been expressly elected, despite what the erroneous auto-email stated.
I think they are smart enough to avoid that. They’ll probably send invoices and some small percent may voluntarily pay to just make it stop quickly. Others will ignore, but their amount due will accumulate to a point that this company will be able to sell those accounts to debt collectors.
I would love nothing more to learn that a debt collector got screwed buying up these accounts, but how is that not fraud on the part of the company, since the resulting debts are clearly not valid?
I use both because of different companies we work with. FogBugz is much friendlier, but Jira does more. And Jira also has a massive number of free and commercial integrations available. When DevFactory purchased FogBugz from
Fog Creek they went into rent collecting mode. They keep the lights on, but they are not going to renovate or introduce new features.
Seems like they (A) are killing the free tier and forcing active users to upgrade to paid plans; and (B) screwed up and also sent out emails to users who have been inactive and had their accounts deactivated (thus accounting for the flood of angry people who have gotten demand letters for a site that's throwing 500 errors for them).
So, total fuckup on their part. While it's not out of bounds for them to phase out the free tier, doing so with basically no notice to those active users, and then also accidentally spamming the (at a guess) 95+% of users who once signed up for FogBugz and then never touched it again ... not great, Bob. Not great. Hope their acquisition price didn't assume the ability to convert those free tier users to paid, because I doubt many are willing to stick around given the way this was handled.
I'm certain I had a FogBugz account at one time, but it must have been on an email address I no longer use; I searched mail, spam, and trash to see if I got one of these invoices.
We need to get even a few dozen people who got the invoice to report to the state's AG for sending fake invoices. This is the type of issue that state AGs love. (For example here's Kansas AG on it: https://ag.ks.gov/media-center/news-releases-test/2015/01/30... ). If all of a sudden they started getting multiple complaints, they will have to answer for it.
Hail GDPR. I have a lot of trust and faith in the European corporate and business culture as far as these things go, but I'm happy I can make companies here delete my payment details, so tricks like these can't be pulled.
Yet GDPR is also what ruins the web browsing experience with all those idiotic cookies notices. Legislating technical details like that is never a good idea.
The popups are there because companies would rather not comply with the GDPR and it gives them a thin veneer of justification which means they're not the lowest hanging fruit for the under resourced DPAs when it comes to enforcement. They've started slapping Google for the methods of gaining consent being BS and hopefully they start working their way down to list until enough others get the message.
has anyone their DPO contact? legal page goes into nowhere, but I'm going to leverage the full extent of my gdpr given rights against them because of this dick move
> Our current customers are our only focus, and each should expect excellence from every aspect of IgniteTech. If at any time you believe we are falling short, the buck stops on my desk.
Bugs, source control, project management, diagramming, documentation etc. etc. I never sign for such services in a first place. It is either perpetual license or take a hike.
To play devils advocate, is this not just an exercise to remove stale accounts? It looks like everyone who received the email does not have a payment method on their account so it seems more like "If you don't add a payment method to your account we'll be closing it?"
That could be handled much better in that case. "Dear valued customer"... You know that I haven't logged in over 10 year, don't use the service and never paid anything. I'm not a valued customer.
Why not just write: Hey, we notice that your account isn't actively use, click here to close it.
If you want to remove stale accounts, then send a 60-day warning and then delete the accounts. Don't try to act like fly-by-night scam artist and demand money for something you're not owed.
The kicker is that the billing FAQ 404s, the "account URL" 500s, and there is no apparent way to log in to the account that they are billing me for.
At this point the best I can do is hope they don't have any real PII to try to collect their bullshit bill.