Hi,
If you do not currently pay us by Direct Debit and have no interest
in doing so then you can ignore this email.
== Short version ==
From 27 April 2020 we're introducing a minimum Direct Debit charge
of £5.00. Any time we would charge you less than £5.00, we are going
to charge you £5.00 and credit your account with the difference.
As there is no BitFolk plan that costs less than £6.49+VAT per month
THIS WILL AFFECT ALMOST NO ONE, unless you somehow get a lot of
credit on your account, or order something small (like 5GiB of
storage) and generate a one-off bill.
If you do not like this, I'm afraid we will have to ask you to
cancel your Direct Debit mandate and pay us by some other method.
You can do that from:
https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/billing/
If you are feeling nice you can also set a higher minimum charge,
which saves us giving fees to our payment provider. You can do that
from the link above.
Or you could switch to quarterly or yearly payments. Please contact
support@ to do that.
That's everything you need to know and you can stop reading now if
you like.
Thanks!
== Long version ==
=== What's happening ===
From 27 April 2020 we'll be introducing a minimum charge of £5.00 on
Direct Debit payments.
=== Background ===
Almost half of you currently pay us by Direct Debit. I previously
mentioned that as of March 2020 our Direct Debit payment provider
(GoCardless) was introducing a £0.20 loading on every transaction,
in addition to their usual 1% transaction fee.
The majority of our customers are on the smallest plan, at £7.79 inc
VAT per month. As an example, pre-March the fees for that charge
were £0.08 (1%). Now they are £0.28. Overall, the £0.20 loading has
resulted in an 83% increase in our transaction fees.
For that reason I asked customers to please consider either
switching to quarterly or yearly payments, or else consenting to a
higher minimum charge, with the remainder being credited to the
account.
A fair few of you did switch and one customer increased their
minimum charge. As only one person had switched I did not actually
implement anything except the ability to choose the charge, and we
carried on charging the exact amount.
Today I have noticed that a Direct Debit payment failed to go
through, because we were trying to charge only £0.83. GoCardless
have obviously altered their API to not support such a small charge,
which I suppose makes sense and gives me the motivation needed to do
the same on BitFolk's side, because otherwise this customer's
service can never be marked as paid for.
=== What we're doing ===
If I am going to implement a minimum charge then I don't see the
point of trying to make it as low as it possibly can be, given that
I still have to do all the work and write this email just to tell
you about whatever value it is. It appears that the minimum charge
is £1.00. I've made the decision that our minimum charge will be
£5.00, which is still well below the regular cost of any plan we
sell, so will affect almost no one.
So, we have no choice but to implement a minimum charge. We could
handle it by batching up your invoices until they are >= £5.00 but
that is a lot of work for a situation that is really rare, and I
also don't want to be billing people in arrears. I'm choosing to set
the minimum at £5.00, not £1.00.
=== What you can do ===
If this upsets you and you never want to be charged potentially
£4.99 extra that sits on your account as credit then I'm afraid you
will have to cancel your Direct Debit mandate before 27 April 2020
and start paying us by some other means. You can do that from:
https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/billing/
Otherwise, thank you for your understanding!
Additionally if you want to be nice you could:
- Set a minimum charge that's higher than £5.00. You can do that
from the link above. The excess will sit on your account as
credit, you can have it back at any time, and it will reduce what
we pay out as fees.
- Change to a quarterly or yearly contract. Please contact support@
if you'd like to do that.
=== We still like GoCardless / Direct Debit ===
Obviously I'm not thrilled that fees for anything have gone up by
83%, but I just want to state factually that even so, the fees for
GoCardless are still less than PayPal and Stripe (credit cards).
We are contractually obliged by various merchant contracts to not
place one payment method above another in terms of favour or
prominence, but hopefully just repeating a fact is okay!
=== What about Direct Debit payments from outside the UK? ===
At the moment in order to pay us by Direct Debit you need a bank
account in GBP and a UK postal address¹.
GoCardless recently opened up their service to those in the Single
European Payments Area, USA, Canada, and probably Australia/NZ too.
This would be charged in your local currency and I am still
grappling with the changes needed for that. It will happen at Some
Point.
=== Further questions? ===
If you have any questions please reply; your reply will go to the
users mailing list and I will answer there, or else if you want to
ask in private please send to support@.
Thanks!
Andy
¹ Some financial providers like TransferWise do provide GBP accounts
with a Direct Debit feature and provide a UK address you can use
to set up Direct Debit mandates no matter where in the world you
live. That works. Also if you have a GBP account with a UK bank
but happen to live outside UK, it works right now to provide your
bank's address.
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
