Tell HN: MS365 upgrade silently to 25 licenses, tried to charge me $1,035
Hey guys, quick warning about a crazy MS 365 dark pattern I ran into last night.
I was testing the business basic plan for a side project. Decided to upgrade to the annual tier to get the discount ($3.45/mo). Clicked convert to paid, put my burner card in, and got a $0.00 confirmation email. Thought we were good.
Woke up today to my bank blocking a charge for exactly $1,035.00.
Turns out when you hit the annual upgrade, Microsoft silently defaults the quantity dropdown to 25 licenses. No warning prompt at all. (25 seats x 12 months x $3.45 = $1,035). They send the zero-dollar invoice to make you think it's an auth hold, then try to drain your card while you sleep.
The best part? When I went to their support chat to ask why my billing was so high, the system conveniently gave me a "System error, try again later" message. You can't even get help.
Luckily I used a virtual corporate card with a strict limit for this test, otherwise my bootstrapped project would be out a grand today. Watch out for that hidden quantity field guys.
> There was no clear pop-up, no "Are you sure you want to
You haven't learned MSFT's m.o. yet... this kind of pop-up only shows up when you're absolutely certain about something, like removing files. In those cases they ask for confirmation endlessly and needlessly.
When they're trying to collect money, they go ahead and quickly guess with all the defaults as they see fit. I'm surprised the default isn't 1000 seats tbh. After all, you're certain to be a huge success now that you've chosen them as a vendor.
I love LibreOffice for documents, but in this case I was specifically trying to set up custom domain email routing (Exchange) for my project. Sadly LibreOffice can't host my MX records haha. If only setting up decent email deliverability was as easy as installing an open-source word processor.
You haven't learned MSFT's m.o. yet... this kind of pop-up only shows up when you're absolutely certain about something, like removing files. In those cases they ask for confirmation endlessly and needlessly.
When they're trying to collect money, they go ahead and quickly guess with all the defaults as they see fit. I'm surprised the default isn't 1000 seats tbh. After all, you're certain to be a huge success now that you've chosen them as a vendor.
;-)