Why you shouldn't use HowAboutWe
runspired.comTLDR: OP paid for HowAboutWe event and got locked out of account. Support takes longer than 48 hours to respond, so OP publicly declares HowAboutWe is guilty of fraud.
Thanks for this tl;dr, very helpful. I read 2x the OP's tl;dr and 1x his post but didn't get his point at all.
In 48 hours I received one email, a very brief email claiming I didn't have an account with them.
Which couldn't possibly have been a mistake. Had to be fraud.
By the legal definition of fraud, yes, they are currently guilty of it.
Is 48 hours too short a period of time to wait before calling them out on it? I debated. What ultimately swayed me to write this vs not write this was that I got another email from their system this morning about a deal I'd expressed interest in.
I selected that deal in the same user session as I paid for the event. I received no email confirmation or receipt for my purchase, am told an account for my email address doesn't exist, yet get marketing emails about deals I selected during the same user session.
My post exists because when someone else goes to interact with HowAboutWe, they ought to know in advance that this is a company with poor customer support, poor technical development, and poor billing practices.
Even if HAW refunds me, or does eventually respond to me, new users have a right to know that this is the experience they could receive too.
Fraud is not the same thing as incompetence.
Sounds like a personal problem that you decided to post to HN for some reason.
In some regards, yes. In the larger sense, no. I chose HN because I'm a developer, HN is where I typically stop first for tech news, and the technical issues here are a good lesson for new startups.
When we build apps we need to be aware of "best practices". This includes customer service, feedback within the app when an error occurs, and billing standards. Login issues 4 years into development? Either their framework wasn't properly unit tested or their apps integration to it wasn't.
One thing I should probably have mentioned in my piece and which I'll likely add; despite the tons of email HowAboutWe sends, the only email I didn't get was one confirming my purchase or containing a receipt, although my CC was billed.
Having seen this work many times, I'm not surprised OP decided to post here. Although it's unclear if anyone from the site in question reads HN
It's also interesting that the account you replied to was created apparently just to reply negatively to this article. Is this becoming more common on HN?
If a company treats a small portion of its users badly, it's the responsibility of those users to speak out.
I feel like I should give another personal experience with them. I hope they sort it out with runspired.
I've had a bunch of really great dates through howaboutwe, I never had an issue with them and they've helped us work out scheduling issues with the restaurants and places we've gone. Even after they hiked their rates a little bit, I still found pretty good value out of their service. I work way to much and I would honestly struggle to make sure I got out enough (besides my local spots) if hadn't signed up.