It’s pretty common for corporate stuff (legal or otherwise) to start with no payment changing hands, just a contract. Then an invoice lands either monthly or on completion afterwards.

That makes it easier for the work to actually start (otherwise you need to engage the finance dept up front and they’re often slow), and once the contract is signed and the work started that’s the sales process complete.

Yet more evidence that aggressive adblocking is cyber security.

What in the russian propaganda bot fuckery is this?!

I mean yes I agree with all your points. But I stand by the assertion that it’s too expensive. I could handle $5/month, perhaps, but 300 searches is waaaay too few. That’s 10 per day. I did 10 searches this morning before I got out of bed.

For unlimited searches it’s twice the cost of a streaming service. Yet it has negligible bandwidth costs, and significantly less storage cost, probably less development cost. Sure a small user base too, but at that price they’re really going to struggle to grow it!

It’s really just too expensive.

Wow. I don’t mind paying for stuff if it’s good. But seriously $5/month seems pretty expensive, and you only get 300 searches. $25 for unlimited searches, which seems like an insane amount of money.

I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.

(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)

Wow, not only did they try to do an astroturfing job on their own site, but they also fucked it up. I don’t know why I’m shocked, they fucked everything else up lately.

On a related but different subject, did you know that even before the blackouts Reddit were paying people to make random low effort posts in various subreddits?

Have a look at this user’s posts prior to the blackouts: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/

And read this (which was posted after he got accused of being a karma farming bot), note the admin comment confirming it: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/comments/130zbw6/i_am_a_community_builder_for_reddit/

Community builders are “vetted and paid by Reddit for their time”: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-

Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don’t seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leeds/comments/138gi40/reddit_community_builders_please_read_details/

Who knows how many people they pay to try to influence the site?

A good quality usenet server.