It'd be nice to hear their version of this before I bother to get my butt off the couch and pick my pitchfork. The fact that fee increases weren't communicated because the OP was't subed to promo emails just doesn't smell right. As is the fact that it wasn't obvious from the actual billing statements.
Ps. I remember their CEO (David Barrett) back from the p2p-hackers mailing list days. He ain't one of them Zuckerbergs. The exact opposite in fact.
David's a hardcore coder and a talented technologist, for sure, but... well, he believes whatever he believes at the moment very strongly. He has a very solid reality-distortion field.
As an example, he really believed it was fine to have mechanical turk freelancers see people's receipts. He would say something to the effect of "people throw their receipts in the garbage where any sanitation worker can see them - this no different." I wasn't around when the mechanical turk stuff made the news, but it seems like it caught him totally off guard that people would be upset.
I suspect that the conversation around the price increases went something like:
David: There, I just sent a 3-page-long plaintext email explaining our price updates to everyone.
Other Expensifier: Shouldn't we notify people who have opted out of those emails?
David: If they opted out of announcement emails, they don't want announcment emails. Seems straightforward to me.
Other Expensifier: Yeah, but, like, we don't have multiple opt-out channels. They can either get every multi-page plaintext missive you send, or they can opt out and miss significant price increases.
David: Nope. They made their choice, we should respect it. Multiple opt-out channels are an antipattern. Anyway, the number of users who will be upset about this are vanishingly small - let's worry about the rest.
Not sure about that, I interviewed with Expensify 10 years ago when they had about 2-3 employees. At the time, David clearly had no idea what he was talking about when it came to code. Remember when he posted that inflammatory blog post about not hiring .NET developers? David was super rude to me.
10 years ago woulda been 2011ish? I dunno, he was pretty deeply technical at the time. He had a pretty solid background in distributed systems.
I mean, yeah, he certainly had some terrible opinions about code - that .NET one included. He was also pretty anit-automated-testing, which drove me nuts. But just because he had some bad opinions doesn't mean he wasn't a serious technologist. Perhaps a good coder, but a bad software engineer?
Ps. I remember their CEO (David Barrett) back from the p2p-hackers mailing list days. He ain't one of them Zuckerbergs. The exact opposite in fact.