I don't think you're alone there. This was EXACTLY my mindset as well.
I have the same problem with the various Japanese logic puzzles (Soduku, Nurikabe, Hashi, etc):
1) This is fun!
2) Hmm, I'm using the same algorithms to solve every puzzle
3) I could probably write a solver
4) Don't write solver. Move on to something else.
I singlehandledly forced the replacement of Expensify at my company after some dodgy billing practices. They incrementally, yet substantially, raised our bill over a period of eight months with no notification to us whatsover. It was hard to detect because our bills were already variable values per month (based on active users).
When I discovered the higher rates we were paying I reached out to support and they said I wasn't notified because I elected to opt out of marketing emails. They wouldn't issue a credit either.
I threatened to cancel service and they truly couldn't have cared less. So we dumped them. Very satisfying. It's a shame - the product was ok. But from my persepctive, F these guys.
Not to mention their shady and undisclosed practices of using humans to read receipts when they pretend it's AI / OCR / NLP doing that.
"Expensify has admitted that its declared AI product SmartScan, which is assumed to scan the expense receipts and categorize the details into corresponding expense pool through a machine process, was actually assisted by humans. Breaching privacy of users, the receipts were posted on freelancing websites where freelancers used to take out extracts of information from receipts and send it to Expensify team."
There were some horror stories in YC about staff running certain receipts thru expensify, leading to bank or bitcoin accounts being penetrated and stolen.
I have to concur - i've had the ability to steer companies away from their product.
Expensify was OK before all the OCR stuff and shady billing.
Now with the S1 filing, whatever good designers and engineering talent they had will bail, and the company will be a hollow carcass of its former self. Avoid.
NOTE: the shady billing practices are traditionally the precursor to an S1 filing. Usually, a company going public has earnout/incentives, so they will do whatever it takes to increase revenue preIPO, even if that directly impairs the company's long term future.
> There were some horror stories in YC about staff running certain receipts thru expensify, leading to bank or bitcoin accounts being penetrated and stolen.
Can you cite this? I couldn't find anything seems obscure to search though.
Seems insane to me that a receipt leads to funds stolen.
How can you steal something from an account by looking at the receipt? I mean, receipts are being thrown out in piles, if that was possible i'd become rich just by digging in a dumpster near a convenience store.
I worked at Expensify a few years ago. Except for some email and PDFs, the process is entirely manual. The justification is that humans just do it better with a reasonable and predictable cost.
I tried building an AI/OCR style receipt digitisation system into my SaaS (https://usebx.com). Let me tell you, it was not easy at all. So much so, that I doubt the problem can be solved efficiently at scale without using humans. In the end, we even considered using Amazon mechanical turk, but it just wasn't worth the hassle.
At the time, I was also amazed beyond words at what Expensify and similar companies claimed to have achieved with their "AI". I find it somewhat comforting to know that they lied and it was mostly manual!
So often I find these 'AI' systems are just smoke and mirrors. You have a great system, nobody is interested. Sprinkle on some 'ai' magic beans, and people are now throwing money at you.
I got hit by the same year long gradual bill increase. I didn't notice at first, as the number seemed right, but then at 6 months or so I looked into why the price seemed so much higher than what I remember and got really upset.
When I looked into it, it seemed as though they restructured their plans multiple times during the ~4 years I was paying them, and I got placed into the most expensive option which was originally the same price as what I started with. I was also locked into a year long commitment at some point, and they wouldn't budge on letting me downgrade to the lower plan mid year (I didn't have a use for any of the advanced features).
The support chat told me the same thing about the changes being announced via marketing emails, and said they could not credit, cancel or downgrade my plan. The support agent also couldn't care less when I said it would cause me to cancel my plan at renewal.
The whole experience left me with a really bad impression, I went from a huge advocate to telling everyone to avoid them.
It'd be nice to hear their version of this before I bother to get my butt off the couch and pick my pitchfork. The fact that fee increases weren't communicated because the OP was't subed to promo emails just doesn't smell right. As is the fact that it wasn't obvious from the actual billing statements.
Ps. I remember their CEO (David Barrett) back from the p2p-hackers mailing list days. He ain't one of them Zuckerbergs. The exact opposite in fact.
David's a hardcore coder and a talented technologist, for sure, but... well, he believes whatever he believes at the moment very strongly. He has a very solid reality-distortion field.
As an example, he really believed it was fine to have mechanical turk freelancers see people's receipts. He would say something to the effect of "people throw their receipts in the garbage where any sanitation worker can see them - this no different." I wasn't around when the mechanical turk stuff made the news, but it seems like it caught him totally off guard that people would be upset.
I suspect that the conversation around the price increases went something like:
David: There, I just sent a 3-page-long plaintext email explaining our price updates to everyone.
Other Expensifier: Shouldn't we notify people who have opted out of those emails?
David: If they opted out of announcement emails, they don't want announcment emails. Seems straightforward to me.
Other Expensifier: Yeah, but, like, we don't have multiple opt-out channels. They can either get every multi-page plaintext missive you send, or they can opt out and miss significant price increases.
David: Nope. They made their choice, we should respect it. Multiple opt-out channels are an antipattern. Anyway, the number of users who will be upset about this are vanishingly small - let's worry about the rest.
Not sure about that, I interviewed with Expensify 10 years ago when they had about 2-3 employees. At the time, David clearly had no idea what he was talking about when it came to code. Remember when he posted that inflammatory blog post about not hiring .NET developers? David was super rude to me.
10 years ago woulda been 2011ish? I dunno, he was pretty deeply technical at the time. He had a pretty solid background in distributed systems.
I mean, yeah, he certainly had some terrible opinions about code - that .NET one included. He was also pretty anit-automated-testing, which drove me nuts. But just because he had some bad opinions doesn't mean he wasn't a serious technologist. Perhaps a good coder, but a bad software engineer?
Hah - the idea of changes to your contractual billing rate being classified as marketing emails... one really does see something new everyday in tech...
The pickers in my neighborhood are a nuisance. If my recyling bin is full, then they move good recyclables from my recycling bin to my trash bin in order to try to find cans and bottles. Often, then don't move them back when they're done rummaging.
Yeah, in theory I have 0 problem with people picking through the dumpsters at my place. In practice though trash gets thrown around outside the dumpster for the wind to make a mess of the parking lot with. I wouldn't care at all if they would just pick up after themselves. But they don't - so I do care.
So why not provide a bin for them for the deposit recyclables? I'll tell you what, if you would like to pick out your preferred bin, show me it, and I'll pay for it for you. If that's really your problem then I can make the effort with a simple and easy solution.
1) We're services/project oriented. So for each $1 we spend, we receive ~$20 back on revenue. That unfortunately doesn't compound and isn't recurring in the normal SaaS sense.
2) That's $20:$1 on revenue but not profit. We average between 15-25% net profit. Not great and we're trying to focus heavily on increasing this but it's quite tricky. Incrasing this usually means very expensive equipment purchases for automation.
3) I wish we could pour more money into advertising but we have to save up for additional equipment to purchase to expand services or pay for future software projects that could help us generate recurring revenue. We don't have deep pockets to leverage since it's bootstrapped. Otherwise, we'd have gone in guns blazing on advertising!
I think they're saying that they are unable to meet the demand (lack of either equipment or people) for the new business those extra advertising dollars would bring in. So they can't just continually pour $ into that pump.
Although I agree it's unusual to see that metric used (revenue per ad-spend) for a product that seemingly can't be scaled very much.
One of my gripes about this price point is that they downgraded the buns they use with their hot dogs a few years ago. They used to be these tasty, substantial picnic rolls, but now they're bland and bready. I'd happily pay a few cents more to get the better buns.
The real kicker is that if you look at the photo of the hotdogs in their food courts (in SoCal, at least), the photos are of the old, picnic style buns and NOT what they are serving today - a bait-and-switch (bake-and-switch?) if you ask me...
The buns are declining in quality... you have to ask for the free toppings now (like onions and sourkraut which were always kept in the condiments counter until a year or two ago). They are now kept in carefully measured tiny plastic containers completely void from view. And the quality of the "meat" inside has dropped off a cliff in recent years.
I don't enjoy them at all anymore, where as I used to go into Costco sometimes just to get their hotdogs.
It's not the same $1.50 hotdog when they change literally everything about it.
That's local to your area. We still have the hand crank onions and ketchup/mustard/brown mustard/relish dispensers, and the dogs have been the same in my region for at least the last six years.
The kids here use the same cup for soda refills for years or until it disintigrates, or the faded colors or outdated color scheme gives the little punks away.
I have the same problem with the various Japanese logic puzzles (Soduku, Nurikabe, Hashi, etc): 1) This is fun! 2) Hmm, I'm using the same algorithms to solve every puzzle 3) I could probably write a solver 4) Don't write solver. Move on to something else.