Another Unfuddled Experience

We started using Unfuddle.com to be our Subversion, bug tracking, and project management solution a few months back. As time has gone on I’ve become to rely on it heavily. Nothing illustrates that quite as much as the feeling you get when it isn’t accessible anymore.

You see my business office changed their credit card info. They gave me access to their new card and a typed its numbers into Unfuddle.com’s automatic biller. When I did that, I must have transposed a few numbers. Yesterday was the day that automatic billing takes place. We were charged, the charge failed, and as such due to a bug in their system our quota was lowered to its free level (200MB) instead of our actual quota (10GB.) Once you go over quota, they lock down your account to prevent subsequent commits and updates. I’m sure they do this to prevent runaway processes from going over quota and causing problems. It also has the effect of bringing everything to a grinding halt.

I fixed the credit card, and got confirmation from the system that I had entered it correctly this time. But still no commits.

I sent in a support email, as that is their only means of support contact. But my boss started circling asking when he would be able to commit again. He started talking faster, and faster, which made it clear that he was getting agitated by the possibility of problems publishing his application for an important demo this morning.

So I started searching through previous correspondence with support to see if they had a phone number in their signature. Lo and behold, one support technician had his mobile phone in his signature. At this point I’m torn: I don’t want to bother this guy on his mobile; but I didn’t want my boss to become John Moschitta. Finally after looking up the area code and finding out the guy was in Hawaii, I decided that if he got to be a cool web 2.0 programmer and live in Hawaii then I was going to not feel too bad about calling him on his mobile.

He was extremely cool about being bothered (he was in fact not in the office that day). But I explained the situation, and told I would accept being shunted to another support person (as he was out of the office,) but he would have none of it and within literally 3 minutes of talking to him, we were happily unfuddling again. He also said he would look into the bug that caused us to not have the customary 2 week compliance period.

I’m already a pretty pleased customer but this turned me into a passionate customer. That’s the sort of competent, fast response you wish your vendors would give every time.

In short, Unfuddle.com rocks.