I have the same concern. I have not intentionally agreed to be charged any fees and was surprised to see this one. Please refund the $13 and terminate any accounts I may have with TurnkeyLinux.

Plan: Pay-per-use ACTIVATED!

Really??  Who activated this?  Not me, for sure!

My AWS account was also billed $13 unexpectedly.

I went through my email and see that on June 21st I got an e-mail from Amazon Payments indicating TKL pricing was changed to $10 per month recurring.  However, I didn't notice the initial email and was surprised to see my AWS account charged today.

I understand if you guys want to start charging a monthly fee for your service, but I don't think one email without any type of confirmation from the user is adequate notification of the change.  The email I got wasn't even from TKL, it was from Amazon Payments.

What's going on?  Was this something done by accident?

Which I at least got...

But obviously with so many posts from so many users in such a short period of time, TKL hasn't done enough to inform users of the changes... I have made direct contact with the core devs (they are offline ATM) and hopefully one of them will post here soon.

I am not saying it's right... but I did find an email from Amazon Payments on June 7 that showed the $10 monthly charge. The $10 is shown WAY at the bottom of the email and I didn't scroll past all the regions that I don't use so did not see it either.

I've cancelled my TKL applications on Amazon. Even if I had seen the $10 fee, all I do is run backups with TKL backup/restore and a $10/month premium is crazy.

I can understand your concern and annoyance at this occurring the way it has, but please keep calm people. Obviously it is far from ideal, but just hold off a sec...

Resorting to threats before the core devs have had a chance to even look at this issue (let alone respond) is a little too much I think. It is ~2am in Israel right now...! They are no doubt sleeping and not even aware of this issue...

Seriously it is $13... I'm sure you can hold off for a few hours to get some sort of response from the core devs before getting yourselves wound up into a lather of indignant fury!?

I am pretty sure I received at least 4 e-mails (from both Turnkey AND Amazon) prior to this change. 

As for threatening the devs of Turnkey for a charge of $13, come on...  First off, they volunteer their time to make these appliances so giving them a measly $13 is almost an insult for the hard work they've done.  Second, Amazon is who is processing your card through Visa and if you think any reports about a company who processes billions every year and has their own claims dept to handle such issues is going to do anything, well that's one of the funniest things I've heard all day.

Be nice, chalk it up to a misunderstanding and get your refund.  No need to bad mouth such a beneficial project to others who might not mind paying such a small fee every month.

...and no, I have no affiliation with Turnkey and when I saw the charge was coming I actually upgraded my account to the next level up.

;-)

They volunteer their time to make these appliances so giving them a measly $13 is almost an insult for the hard work they've done. 

Volunteer

It's quite easy to cancel your account. Just login to the hub and under your profile choose cancel next to the pay-per-use plan.  I canceled mine after I upgraded because I saw both were listed still.  You probably have to go through Amazon for the refund. 

The $13 charge is billed as EC2 usage.   I logged in to Turnkey Hub where I haven't been for at least a year.  It shows no EC2 connection and the setup indicator for 'Backup and Migration' shows incomplete, i.e. that I've setup a connection to S3 but not selected anything to backup.

My AWS EC2 control panel shows no content at all.  My S3 control panel shows some old buckets of personal files I uploaded long ago.

In other words, this has to be an error.

Login to the hub, click on "EC2 Account" and in the right column you will see "Plan: Pay-Per-Use" with a link to cancel it to the right. 

And what a morning it is. Just opened my laptop after taking my son to pre-school and saw this forum thread.

First and foremost, if it isn't obvious we don't want anyone that isn't happy with the work we're doing at TurnKey to help fund its ongoing development.

The $13 you were charged is made up of $10 monthly fee for July + $3 in monthly fees since June 22 when the price change went into efect.

I'd like to encourage the outraged users who overlooked or somehow missed the multiple price notifications to help us set things right by cancelling their subscription to the Pay-Per-Use plan (formerly the Hobby plan on the Hub). You can do that by logging in to the Hub, going to the EC2 account page. In the Account Details you'll see the plans you are signed up for. Click on the Cancel link for the Pay-per-use plan. As soon as you cancel you will be immediately refunded the pro-rata share of the $10 monthly fee for July. If you do that right now (Wednesday) you'll get $9.20 credited immediately to your Amazon account.

As for the extra $3 billed for June TurnKey doesn't have direct control over Amazon's billing system so there's no button I can push to initiate a refund request from our end. However, you can contact Amazon, Amazon will in turn contact us to authorize the refund and we will approve it. 

I'm open to ideas on what else we could have done to try and prevent some users from missing this, but short of sitting down in person with everyone effected there's no way to guarantee that whatever methods we use to inform users about something like this will grab the attention of 100% of users.

Multiple notifications were sent out well in advance regarding the price change. TurnKey sent emails to all Hub users as well as all website newsletter subscribers. Amazon sent out a notification on June 7th regarding the upcoming price change, and followed up with another notification on June 22nd when it went into effect.

Additionally, we published a blog post on June 6th detailing the price change:

Users that signed up to what we used to call the Hobby plan should receive an email from Amazon in the next few days detailing a price change which will come into effect two weeks later: we'll be dropping the markup on usage fees from 15% to 10% and adding a $10 monthly fee.

We aren't too happy about having to change the pricing structure of what was formerly the Hobby plan. Unfortunately, in the wake of a series of steady price reductions in instance usage fees this plan has gone from bringing in a small amount of revenue, to barely covering costs, to actually costing us money. This happens because Amazon's billing system (AKA DevPay) charges us a small fixed fee per user that signs up. It used to be that the markup on usage fees covered this cost but now users with significant usage do the math and just sign up for a flat-rate plan.

Instructions for canceling or switching to another plan are available on the Hub. See Account Details in your Hub account's EC2 account page.

We were hoping that at least one of the notifications sent out in all directions, from multiple sources would catch everyones attention, but obviously some users slipped through the cracks.

Lastly, no need for the threats guys. TurnKey is not evil nor out to bleed you dry. As Liraz mentioned in his post for-great-justice:

We've come to understand (the hard way) how important it is to become financially sustainable and have sources of revenue. Thank goodness we can pay the rent now while working on TurnKey full-time. But this isn't about the money for us. We want TurnKey to be more of an open source project that has a little side business going than a business that has a little open source project going. As far as we're concerned the business stuff should just another piece of infrastructure that helps keep TurnKey ticking. Like our servers. It shouldn't be the focal point and it should serve the open source project rather than other way around.

We do need to grow the team and bring more full-time people on board and that requires expanding our sources of revenue. But ultimately what we want our team to be doing is supporting a rich, vibrant community that celebrates open source. Not "maximizing shareholder value". We think there's a way to do that that isn't based on wishful thinking and open source pixie dust, but only time will tell if we're right.

In the meantime if we want to hold on to our somewhat ideal, naive notions we have to stay in control. That means going against the flow, ignoring the siren call of investors and doing stuff with our own time, on our own dime. We pay for that by going slower, but in our minds that's a small price to pay for staying true to ourselves and to the open source spirit that led us to found TurnKey in the first place.

I agree wholeheartedly there's a tremendous amount of room for improvement. By all means voice your opinions, ideas and criticism. We read everything, even when we don't have time to respond.

Bear with us: from where I'm looking there are some very exciting times ahead as we lay the critical pieces in place required to unlock TurnKey's true potential. We're working on that right now. We still have some hidden aces to play that we hope will delight our users and the open source community. I'd share more details except that we've made enough public promises that I'm worried of breaking so I won't make the situation worse by making even more of those. For now let's just say we're making good progress on a lot of stuff behind the "core" event horizon and we are feeling very optimistic about TurnKey's prospects for the future. Stay tuned!

Bottom line folks, sorry about the mess. We tried, but obviously failed with a number of users. If anyone needs anything, feel free to drop us a line.

Firstly, sorry for the threats. But, try to see it from my point of veiw. I stopped using your product, quite a few months ago (possibly even a year ago). I dont use your product anymore so i dont keep up with your blog. Also i run many other things through amazon so i tend to disregard most of the auto sent bulk mail from them (quite careless, but im busy, and they send me lots of rubbish) .So after not using your product for such a long time i suddenly find a US$13 charge on my credit card from you guys, and was like WTF!!!. 

We have not been running an appliance for many months. We have been caught by the charges and know you would love to make things right.

Looking forward to your speedy and positive intervention & response.

ProductCode=0F611753
Amazon Case 102816871

Thanks

I'm pretty sure I didn't get an email directly from TurnKey about the change, but I did get both emails from Amazon Payments, so it's at least partially my own fault.  Thanks for pre-approving refunds for those of us that weren't paying close enough attention.

In my case, I would have preferred if my account had been temporarily suspended.  I don't think it's been used for over a year, so it would have been reasonable to consider it abandoned.  I'm surprised you guys don't suspend inactive accounts regularily, especially if every abandoned account is costing you a flat fee.  Had I realized my unused account was costing you money, I would have come back and disconnected it as a simple courtesy.

I know that suspending accounts runs the risk of halting the service of someone who uses it, so I can't say I blame you for erring on the side you did.  I'd probably do the same thing if I were forced to choose from two bad options.

I also think a lot more could be done upstream with Amazon Payments.  If you speak with them, feel free to pass on these thoughts.

The emails I got from them weren't very good.  The first email had the recurring fee burried at the bottom of a lengthy list of intance pricing.  The second had the recurring fee noted at the top, but, at a glance, the entire email looks almost identical to the emails they send about pricing changes for the pay-per-use services.  I very likely glanced at it, assumed it was per-use pricing changes and, since I wasn't using the service, ignored it.

All of the emails I get from Amazon Payments are plain text.  Plain text may be necessary, but the important information seems to get lost in the huge dump of instance pricing they include.  In my opinion, changes to flat, recurring fees should be sent in separate emails with clear subjects that indicate the change, especially in cases where a flat, recurring fee is being introduced.

Had I gotten an email saying "A recurring $10 per month fee has been added to TurnKey Linux on EC2", I don't think I would have overlooked it.

Amazon Payments could also give users better options when singing up to services like TurnKey Hub.  For example, an option to temporarily suspend access to the service if a recurring fee is added or changed, but hasn't been approved by the account owner.  That way the user has the ability to judge the risk of unexpected pricing changes vs having the service interrupted.

An option to consider a service abandoned and suspend access after a set period of no usage would also be a good idea.  In my case, the API key associated with my TurnKey Hub account should have been revoked automatically long ago.  I don't think I had any usage associated with it for over a year, not even S3 storage.  It would have been better for all 3 of us if my account would have timed out at some point.

I just cancelled my pay-per-use plan (I haven't used S3 backed servers for a long time anyway... Only EBS backed ones) and instantly got a $9.23 credit on my Amazon account! Nice one! Personally I'm going to consider the $3.77 difference as a donation to TKL! :) The process was pretty straight forward and easy to follow...

Hi all and devs,

I tried but don't find this information anywhere. Please point me to it if exists, thanks.

My question: On canceling the Pay-per-use plan can I still use S3 backups and Dynamic DNS at the Hub? These are the only services I'm using as I really am a hobbyist (I think the old "Hobby plan" was the perfect plan for me...). 

For long time, I was thinking your great effort deserves more revenue from me. For that reason I did a micro-donation, and was thinking in doing another. But from paying an average of 4cents/month to a 13$/month is a really big jump for me.

Thanks in advance,

sergi

I am sure that this thread would be a LOT worse had the accounts NOT been kept online and instead each account with a live server either shutting down or being suspended/deleted.  I too would be singing a different tune if that were the case.  If I were in the same situation as the devs I would choose to do it the same way.  Sometimes you have to choose the lesser of two evils.

I do agree that the 15-page email from Amazon was a bit lengthy though.

Guys, I made the effort to cancel the Pay-Per-Use Plan as you suggested but when I go into the EC2 Account tab it tells me I have no Amazon EC2 account and that I need to create one. Apparently they believe I have one since my account was also charged. Any suggestions?

all my instances are ebs backed and I do not need S3 backed instances. I 'll try to do what you recommend. But I am just wondering why I got signed up with pay per use plan. I only signed up for a USD 20.00 plan / Hobby Plan

Previously Amazon micro instance was only S3 backed. So when I created a micro instance, it was S3 backed but after installing the micro instance I restored my backup to the micro instance and  it automatically became ebs backed. It might be the reason Amazon put me on a pay per use plan on top of Bronze plan. I am just guessing. 

Anyway, I will stick to my original Bronze Plan and cancel the Pay per Use Plan.

Hello,

I too have been bitten by the pricing change.

I signed up for an account last year. I spun up a few virtual machines with the longer term view that I might use them to test development ideas and then show them to work colleagues.  The pay per use idea was promoted heavily in the literature. 

They were advertised as 'no commitment' and so I thought, what the heck? give it a go and kept in the back of my mind that they were available if I wanted to use one or two.  I have long term virtual server contract with another company but like the preconfigured nature of the Turnkey/Amazon solution and they were so easy to use.

Where you guys went wrong was thinking you could change a pricing plan to a recurring liability without your customers *active* approval.  I work in an engineering consultancy world and I cannot suddenly expect *all* my customers to start paying me $X amount per month because they've contacted me at some stage in the last two years.  I could sell them a plan for ongoing support but unless they agree, I can't start billing them.

You can justify your 'but you were sent an email' response but that doesn't cut it.  Without unconditional acceptance of your new terms there is no new contract in place. The correct thing would have been to suspend everyones account after a warning period.

Then, when they logged in (either before or after the end of the warning perioed), have a friendly message informing people that the old pricing plan had been terminated and invite them to sign up to the new plan. And then give them one more months access on the old regime to recover data should they wish not to continue.

People feel very powerless when an international company just starts billing their credit cards. Hence they feel the need to react strongly.  Some of your customers felt they had lost control.

I hope the feedback helps. I've had quite a few emails with Amazon and they've agreed to refund me fully.

You have great product and I know you are trying to turning this into a paying business. Hopefully these a just a few teething issues for you.

Regards,

Chris O'Halloran