Credits, anti-customer

🛠️ Feature Reqs
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Describe your feedback or feature request! Provide screenshots if you have them. Choose one of the below options. (delete this when you post)

  • Feature request: Be less anti-customer by removing flex credits!
  • Product feedback: I will never touch this service again!

Hello, how are you. Fine thank you.

I have an issue with this service.

I created several versions of a dataset. Because I saw that one feature, where it does tiling, but is paid, I thought “okay, let’s try the trial”. Then I happily created versions of a dataset, using tiling. There are 16500 images in the core dataset.

As you can imagine, if you were to tile this dataset, the image count would explode. (2x2, 4x4, 6x6, …)

Now I saw that I am over a credit limit of 15. “Oh, but look, don’t worry, we got you covered. here are 62 flex credits (20k images / credit) that you can pay at the end of the month.”

Cool, very friendly, thanks!

Why must the site be like any modern service and be so so utterly anti-customer, that it makes me not want to ever touch it again? You guys are nuts. I will now create an open source tool that does exactly what the versions do, but for free.

I hope you understand me.

P.S. I am not trying to be disrespectful here. But to whomever designed this scheme in such an anti-customer way, I can’t even put into words what negative things I wish for you to come.

Edit: And clearly I am not the only one with this issue.

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Good morning @rrr,

My name is Ford and I am a Support Engineer at Roboflow. I understand your frustration, this was a bad surprise that needs to be addressed.

I have issued a full refund to your workspace as Prepaid Credits. We have also escalated your feedback, including your concerns about flex credits specifically, directly to our Product team.

When you’re working with 16,500 source images and a tiling pipeline, the resulting credit usage can be significant, and without clear upfront visibility, unexpected. That’s not an acceptable experience, and we are actively reviewing how this should work.

Thank you for taking the time to write this feedback out in detail, it helps us fix the right things.

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Hi Ford.

Thank you very much, despite my passive-aggressive post.

You know, I was kind of prepared to pay it since it does cost computing resources on your end. That’s why I didn’t feel like writing in the highest of praises. It isn’t the first time I visited this site, and last time I did, I 100% noted to myself “ah, there are credits. Oh, but I have 15… good…” and the problem was kind of on me. But you know, still pissed… You can be pissed of me if you want, I can be pissed of you, that’s human nature. :smiley:

If you want my opinions on how to improve it:

  • CLEARLY warn the user, maybe even have them type the project name, or something similar as confirmation
  • Another, probably my more favored, approach would be to block the user from adding versions, locking them out for X months. Then you can get real creative with inflation on credits or whatever. If you know what I mean. Then, one can create a large version, say hundreds of thousands or even millions of images in one version, but it would lock them out afterwards for N-credits/your-rate months from creating versions. If they want to speed up the process, I see no reason not to have the payment as an option.
  • If you choose the option above, you should also warn the user beforehand. Tell them “oh you know, you’re going to have to wait about X months until you can create another version! Or you can speed up by paying.”

Regards