When Popular Companies Treat Their Customers With Contempt… It Doesn’t End Well

The Cloudways Story: How to Lose a Customer in 4 Days

Sunday evening, I turn off my phone and try not to look at it until I’m well awake. But I woke up early around 6 AM and saw an email from Cloudways (now owned by Digital Ocean). Four days earlier, I’d received a notice about a credit card issue on one of my accounts – a $29 monthly bill.

Full disclosure: I’ve had many accounts with Cloudways over the years. Hundreds of customers were on their platform. I still run my business sites and several concierge clients on Cloudways. When they got bought by Digital Ocean, they redesigned their dashboard and billing systems in a way that’s confusing even for a 20-year tech industry veteran.

The problem? My credit card company (a United Black card) had changed the number after a Best Buy employee fraudulently charged a laptop to it. I thought I’d updated all my Cloudways accounts with the new card. I missed one. It was a legacy account with nine clients on it. The bill? $29.

This morning’s email? “We nuked your server. We just deleted it. Goodbye. Goodbye, nine clients. Goodbye.”

Why This Is Customer Contempt, Not Business Policy

I accept that if I have a hosted service and don’t pay the bill, I deserve to have that account frozen. Frozen. Not deleted. Frozen.

Here’s what freaked me out: It was only four days since they told me there was something wrong with the account. In my head, I believed I’d already straightened it out because I’d updated the card on my other accounts. I didn’t realize there was a fourth one.

How dare you? How dare you think it’s a good idea from a business standpoint that four days after a misunderstanding about a credit card update on a $29 bill – when you can clearly see I have multiple accounts and all of them have the same new credit card except for this one – how dare you think it’s okay to delete the server?

The restoration took 39 minutes because it’s disaster recovery. When it came back, I had to go through every site and repoint all the DNS because the IP addresses had changed. I had to reset all the services and configurations. At my chargeable rate of $300/hour, this cost me about 6 hours of work – about $1,800 in lost time.

And that doesn’t count the nine angry customers calling me asking why their sites are offline. These are CPAs and bookkeepers who pay me monthly for assurances that their sites will NOT go offline.

The StreamYard Ransom Note

I’ve had a love affair with StreamYard since the beginning. I’ve promoted them, talked about them, almost as much as my love affair with Fathom. I’m on the solo plan – second tier – paying $45 a month. Just me making videos by myself. No team, no business features.

Some genius at StreamYard thought it was a good idea to send me an email that said: “We’ve decided that you are now a business plan user and according to our fair use terms, you need to be paying $299 a month.”

$299 a month from $45. A 600% increase. Take it or leave it. If you don’t like it, you can eff off and leave. That’s literally what the letter says.

I double-checked what plan I’m on. I double-checked that I’m paying. I double-checked what $299 gets me. Then I went to cancel. And guess what happened?

“By the way, we’re happy to offer you the business plan $299 a month value for the same $45 for the next 12 months if you’ll stay.”

Are you freaking kidding me? This is treating a customer with contempt. Whoever wrote that letter should be fired or publicly outed.

How Rocket.net Does It Right

My business now is with Rocket.net. There are 24 to 29 customers, three principals. They got investment from a larger company. If something like the Cloudways situation happened with Rocket.net, I 100% know that:

A) They would NOT shut off my servers and delete them.
B) They would contact me and say, “Spencer, you okay? Is something wrong? We notice that you’ve got all these accounts and one of them doesn’t have a card. Maybe it’s a misunderstanding. Maybe you can fix that.”

Because that’s what I would do for MY customers. And I’m one person who has thousands of clients. Even if I just had hundreds of clients, I would still make sure that I reached out to everybody if there’s something wrong.

When somebody cancels their account with WPLaunchify – whether it’s MinuteLaunch or FluentMCP – I don’t delete their server. I literally send them a form that says, “I need you to sign this that says you know I’m going to delete your server.” Why? Because that’s good business. That’s common sense.

FluentMCP Pricing: Why Lifetime Deals Matter

On a side note, my friend David Risley referenced FluentMCP in his newsletter (which I was very proud of). He mentioned that he thought it was slightly pricey. I want to justify something because David might not know this:

FluentMCP is priced at $497 for one site, $997 for three sites, $1,497 for 10 sites. It’s lifetime. Lifetime. Lifetime.

He referenced another product that was monthly. If you took the cost of that other product monthly and added it up, FluentMCP is not only a gigantic value, it’s extraordinary.

Upcoming changes: I’m going on record here. FluentMCP is going to be $497 for one site for a YEAR after this video. And the lifetime is going to be probably triple – probably $1,297 for a single site.

Why? Because the things people use it for, the things that it delivers, actually represent that value proposition. And for human beings. If only one person buys it, I don’t care. The people who use it are getting $30,000 projects done in three days with FluentMCP and a little help from me with VIP training.

The Only Thing That Matters in 2025

We’re all trying to figure out how to deal with AI, how to deal with selling, how to deal with marketing in a world where there is very little differentiator other than the human relationship.

For those of you at StreamYard or Cloudways who may hear about this or listen: I speak for at least 4,500 to 5,000 human beings and maybe another 7,000 on my YouTube channel. Many of us have choices.

If you think that you can do this kind of stuff and get away with it – even if it was a mistake – I’m here to remind you in my very small opinion: No, you cannot.

The second that we get treated like second-class citizens, we are going to exercise our choice. And today we have infinite choice.