For the record, I was being sarcastic and do not actually believe it was the customer's fault. I believe this is an abhorrent way of running business by Google.
Right, but I think your sarcasm was misplaced. It is actually possible for customers to make a mistake. These mistakes are relatively easy to prevent. It could be that in this particular case there wasn't anything the OP could have done and they are simply unlucky. But that's very unlikely.
All - absolutely all - the evidence we have seems to show that Google was completely wrong - that a payment didn't go off because of a known Google outage, that the company then made a manual payment, but started to receive threatening messages, that they appealed to billing who told them they were safe, but then the site was cut off in the middle of the night on the weekend.
Your argument appears to be this: "Facts are unimportant: the customer is almost certainly wrong in every case."
Epistimological check-in: we don't actually have any evidence, except for a very high level story from the OP without much relevant detail. So all we have is the base rate, which is in almost all cases when there are billing problems they are at least to some extent because of negligence or fraud on the part of the customer.
The base rate of building problems is that the customer screwed up, and the base rate of Google support problems is that Google is negligent. I'm not sure how to compare these.
Most of it will actually be documented by your provider, and is often pretty obvious. For example, if you're paying with card, have at least one extra as backup payment method (which most providers allow and recommend). For extra safety: make one of these cards a pre-paid debit card loaded with enough money to pay for at least one month. The one thing you don't want to happen is to miss a payment, which could happen for many reasons that aren't under your full control, like a technical problem with one of the cards, a fraud detection false positive rendering your card invalid, etc. And once you are unable to complete a payment, that's when the trouble begins.
> For example, if you're paying with card, have at least one extra as backup payment method (which most providers allow and recommend).
Please don't generalize. There are many countries where credit cards aren't common, and applying for just one (and getting it approved) can already involve a lot of work and take lots of time. Such as: the bank and the national credit authority needing to do a thorough credit check, you having to supply proof of identity and stable income, the bank having to register your new line of credit with the national credit authority, etcetera. Applying for multiple CC's, if at all possoble, only adds more trouble: your registered total amount of credit will rise (even if you haven't used any of it yet) which can limit your options for any other loans like a mortgage, a car loan, a subscription, and so on.
That's true - it's a rather privileged view to assume that everyone all over the world enjoys the same facilities, I know that. If you are somewhere where you can't have services people from rich countries consider basic, like credit cards, then you are left out. That sucks. Hopefully the more decentralized internet being built these days will be a solution.
When the due invoice represents less than 5% of your lifetime value, the least they can do is eat the cost and wait for you to resolve the payment, because, at worst, they’ll lose 5%.
I have taken your advice and will keep this in mind when dealing with cloud providers in the future. That said, I still place the blame on cloud providers when things like this happen.
More like: the driver stops and gestures me to walk over the road. As I step in front of the car, they suddenly jump on the gaspedal and drive over me.
