After tying the service for the first time, out of funds because of a stale pod after disconnecting
Hello. As per the title. I'm a professional comic book artist working with Krita and trying to stay competitive in a difficult market. After finding out about Krita's AI plugin and it capabilities to assist with coloring and finishing sketches and drawings I decided to try it in preparation for a big project. Lacking a powerful PC at the moment I followed the recommendations from the Krita team and tried your services. After a bit of hassle with the set up I signed up with you, added 10 euros in funds and tried the plugin powered by one of the GPUs you offer. The experience with Krita was satisfactory so I decided to use it in the project. However, precisely today when I was planning to use the service seriously for actual work for the first time after the test run, I got an email dated today informing me I've got a stale pod running and I'm out of funds. I'll stress this strongly: not only is this NOT an oversight on my part, forgetting to disconnect from the pod or anything, but in fact I tried EVERYTHING to fully disconnect from it, including your useless -I'm sorry, but such was the actual case- bot not being able to instruct me about navigating your apparently intently obtuse UI in order to stop the service IN FULL, having been left to my own means to figure it out. Being an artist and not a tech, and after trying your own Q&A, the bing chat it and everything I could find about the matter and going with the fragmented and vague information available about such a crucial issue, I apparently managed to stop the service in full, or so I thought until today.
6 Replies
First of all, how do your company waits 3+ weeks to warn me about having a pod running and wasting my funds? Second, how isn't there an automatic disconnect protocol setup for such cases where it's BLATANTLY evident the user has unwilling and inadvertently failed to stop the service in full? And third and most important, how isn't there a clear and present FULL STOP button in your UI? I'm sorry but unless I get at least a CLEAR and throughout explanation about how to effectively and definitively stop the service next time I use it (if I decide to do so about this fiasco, which depends on you) and a 8 euros/dollars refund (I spent around 4 hours with my tests on a 30 cents per hour GPU and I had purchased 10 euros/dollars in funds, and I remember around 8 dollars and plenty of change left when I thought I'd stopped the service in full) in my account funds I definitely won't use or recommend your services anymore and I'll have to go to another company, because I still need the service, and you'll have lost a steady client in the long run. 10 euros/dollars, or 8 in this case, as I effectively and satisfactorily used the service while I INTENDED to do so, may not seem much to you but for me it's a quarter of the weekly grocery shopping, and actually hesitated before making the spending for the very reason I just pointed out, but went for it because I considered it an investment. I've gone from being very happy with the risk I took and the service's performance to be extremely disappointed and feeling deceived by the way it panned out.
If you click on Pods when logged in you see all your machines running. If its listed there you are paying for the service.
Even if they aren't running, you pay for storage. You wouldn't have been able to run a pod for like 3 weeks on 8 euro, it must have been stopped and the storage cost used up the balance. You can't expect RunPod to notify people about running pods if you forget to stop/terminate it. Some people intentionally keep their pods running or stopped.
You can see the running costs at the right,. When youre not running you pay for storage
Also refer to this:
https://docs.runpod.io/references/faq/#billing
FAQ | RunPod Documentation
General questions about RunPod and its services.