My personal (bad) experience with Forge service

Never used the service but that's a bit weird not to have emails. Did you ask about if they actually send emails or not? Would be interesting to know if it was just being blocked or there was a problem sending them. Maybe other customers of Forge can comment.

I am a forge user since 18 months ( Sep 2014 ) now and had no problems so far. Signed up for the 10$ plan and its all good so far. Emails were answered within minutes / hours from @TaylorOtwell

Because the invoice: You are maybe right - But i think: I know i signed up for a payed monthly service, so i know that my card is charged every month. Why should i get an email that reminds me of that? :) If i need an Invoice i can log in into forge and download it. But yea - Maybe its helpful for other users to get a monthly invoice.

I only got an Email once that my card cant be charged :) Apart of that you only get an Email if you provisioned a new Server or created a new Recipe.

I too think the only reasonable way is to email customers every time you charge them. Companies like DigitalOcean, Apple and Microsoft does so.

Not sure if it's legal requirement too.

In Europe (which I am from) its requirement to call or send emails (or sms) and notify customer before you charge his credit card. I have made a claim in a similar case on the past and I got a full refund just because the provider (android application) didn't sent an email prior to charge my card (even it was in their terms).

I imagined that.

@TaylorOtwell

"My mistake? I never do such mistakes"

That is a bold statement for which you have no proof. Just accept that people make mistakes and that includes you. Whatever went wrong, could be easily resolved by contacting support instead of complaining about it.

That is a bold statement for which you have no proof. Just accept that people make mistakes and that includes you. Whatever went wrong, could be easily resolved by contacting support instead of complaining about it.

Any case I think he is right about the legal terms.

I've had no issue with Forge, and happy with it. I did have one issue that Taylor did respond quickly but I did check all my forge emails and there wasn't a "Welcome to Forge" email. Always a "Server Provisioned". May be nice to have a welcome email with details of the plan etc. :-)

I believe the main concern about Forge, and all other Laravel LLC products (Envoyer, Cashier [I forgot the commercial name of Cashier product]) is the fact it is a one-man-show.

We all know Taylor is great, he created Laravel, we all love him, etc, etc, etc. Let's not spend too much time on that, if we didn't think his products are great we wouldn't be here talking about Laravel to start with.

Let's then analyse it from a business/reliability stand point:

1. I use Forge and Envoyer since September 2015. I like the products so much that I already paid for 2017 and 2018 in advance;

2. Although the products are good, there are a few issues or room for improvements - as pretty much any other product. Taylor usually replies telling me that "requested feature was added to the product roadmap" but when asked about sharing the roadmap with me he never replied. I asked more than once. For instance I asked in September 2015 about the possibility of adding the "deployed by" column on Envoyer, as I manage a dev team and I would like to know which member of my team has triggered a deployment;

3. Taylor is admirable for his ability to really focus on a minimum viable product (MVP) on everything he builds. That's brilliant! That's a talent he clearly has! On a subscription based service though, perhaps the long term clients need to feel that the service is continuously improving, or at least to know what is about to come, or maybe get a monthly e-mail just saying "Hey, you know what? We're just the greatest service ever and one more month has passed without any need for improving our products. Isn't that cool?". Whatever makes the customer feels that the service owner reminds that there are customers paying for that service and making it profitable;

4. Taylor, as any human being, might take vacation, or be giving a presentation, or traveling, whatever keeps him unable to answer a support ticket, and then you just need to wait. He will probably reply and he will most likely address your issues. When? There's no SLA to expect. Is the service too cheap to offer customer care/support team? Then perhaps the business model, plans, pricing should be reviewed;

5. Maybe I am the problem: I have a team, I am an employee of a for-profit company, and the company cares about SLA and how reliable our vendors are. One might say Laravel LLC products are targeting the single dev-entrepreneur audience. Fair enough! But if you are a single dev running your own product, will you then need to move out of Forge once your business grow? I also run my own products, and as a Laravel-"fanboy" I try to promote Laravel tools on the companies I work for, as a way to be thankful and give back to Laravel as Laravel helped me a lot, but I am starting to be worried about how sustainable Laravel LLC products might be in the long run;

6. Back to the original question of this thread, I also believe a welcome message/subscription renewal message should be sent by e-mail every time a new payment is due or processed. It gives transparency to any business/customer relationship, it can only be good.

In the end, I believe more transparency would help Laravel LLC products to grow and be adopted by more companies that are able to pay, they need such a similar service, but they need to feel that they can rely on it.

@jfo Taylor made his first full-time hire this summer, so at least some of your issues/questions might be a little more covered now. I seem to remember reading that a lot of the new employee's time was going to be given over to helping with forge etc.

Taylor is spending a lot of his time on Forge and the Framework. Mohamed Said is working on Spark, Lumen and issues / bugs in the Laravel Framework.

Definitely not a legal requirement to email every invoice to a user. All invoices are easily accessible from your account menu in Forge.