Hi Loree, and for everyone who is reading,
On Jun 30th, 2017, Loree and All in Bits, Inc had signed a contract to begin developing a CI tool for Tendermint.
The contract included a provision to pre-pay $20K USD, and hourly thereafter.
Meanwhile we asked Loree to join our Slack channel to communicate with the team to go over requirements.
We also gave Loree a
loree@tendermint.com email address.
The initial $20K payment had issues. First we tried Bitwala but it didn't go through. Then we sent a check for $20K. This process took over two months, but we weren't concerned about it because it wasn't time sensitive, and it didn't seem that Loree had started her work yet. We figured, because:
* She never signed into our Slack as we asked
* She never signed into her
loree@tendermint.com email address.
The check for $20K was sent on the week of July 24th. It was scheduled to arrive on Thursday, but by Thursday Loree had told Matt that the check had not gone through. Despite further communications to verify delivery of the check, on Friday and Saturday Loree had not responded. Matt canceled the check Sunday night because it seemed like was lost in the mail.
Then on Aug 1st, Loree sent us an invoice. The invoice we received said the following:
* Initial payment (past due): $20K
* June (past due): $21.6K
* July (past due): $27.0K
* Aug: $21.6K.
For a total of $90.2K.
So to recap, Loree charged us $90.2K while we hadn't even begun to discuss the design of thing, and she never signed into our Slack as we asked, nor even signed into her
loree@tendermint.com email address.
On Aug 7th we received a letter from her lawyer (Jon) requesting payment for $23K.
Even stranger, on Oct 17th we received an email from Loree with the following body:
Ethan,
Things have been a real challenge to get straightened out. The payment issue caused so much concern that the actual product that was created for you all to use got lost in the mix. I think you still need it.
In an attempt to avoid any further diversion I setup the latest code base on a server @ aws. It is a live demo of the “Jenkins Watchman Cloud” product that was created to support multi cloud deployments. It was specifically designed to support block replica instances that at hosted on multiple cloud platforms. It also provides for synchronous deployments to the various clouds. Below are the live server urls. Please feel free to click around.
Also there is a new feature called Watchman Console. It is an imbedded information blog that makes keeping up with build jobs as easy as a scroll.
I have put a product information URL below also.
The whole system self maintains and need very light systems administration, once learned there is no need for a dedicated Jenkins administrator because it enforces its own policies and spins its resources down in the evening.. Conserving money and reducing the cloud footprint.
(Several URLs redacted)
Despite attempts to communicate with Loree all we got were lawyers and invoices (with the exception of the unwanted deliverable on Oct 17th). We've never had issues like this in the past with anyone.
We refuse to pay for such blatant unprofessionalism.
Poll
