Today, an error within the Fog Creek Copilot billing system caused 14 users to be overcharged for the month of January. The error was caused by an accounting error in which users would have more minutes billed to their account than they actually used during the month. Normally, a monthly auditing process ensures that none of these false connections are actually billed for, but due to development on upcoming improvements to the billing system, there was a split between the billing system code and the auditing code, which caused the audit to fail to report erroneous transactions.
The new improvements to the billing system will remove the need for extensive audits each month by setting a minimum bandwidth threshold for Copilot sessions to be billed that will ensure that false connections will not be counted in the billing process. Additionally, server changes are nearly ready that will help eliminate false connections entirely. Finally, all future audits will be run from the billing system itself, so that future divisions cannot exist.
We have refunded the erroneous charges to all affected users' credit cards. We're very sorry if we've caused any inconvenience.
