How Do You Pay an Invoice?

I had not realized I would be charged for downloads of premium content posted on the Digital Market.
I already took action so that this doesn't happen again by moving the premium content to Google Drive and double compressing the file.
I received an invoice, via girbot, and it shows up in my transactions, but I am having trouble finding how to pay my account balance.

How do you pay your account balance?

hmmm... you got charged a fee but you didn't make a sale.  This seems odd to me.

I've sent up the Bat Signal to see if it's supposed to do that (if so, maybe we need to improve the text) or if it is not supposed to do that.

I thought permies just took a small cut with each purchase?

Daron Williams wrote:I thought permies just took a small cut with each purchase?

That's my understanding too.

And yet, there was a charge but no purchase.  I wonder if we found a glitch?  

Seems like it could be. If it is supposed to be happening then it seems like the type of thing that should be clearly stated since potential sellers won't like to be surprised by charges.

Dave - By any chance did you test downloading the file from your page yourself? Just wondering if that could have triggered something.

Daron Williams wrote:Dave - By any chance did you test downloading the file from your page yourself? Just wondering if that could have triggered something.

Yes, I did test the download to make sure that the .zip file works. The charge that gir bot sent me was for exceeding the bandswidth on permies, which I was unaware of, but now I know. And that’s why I moved it to being a double compressed file on Google Drive.

And now, I’m wondering where I go on permies to pay the invoice, because at the moment, paying invoices seems unintuitive to me. I don’t see any “link to pay.”

I sent an email to the people who fix things.  They should be having a look in soon.  

r ranson wrote:I sent an email to the people who fix things.  They should be having a look in soon.  

Thank you!

Dave Burton wrote:Yes, I did test the download to make sure that the .zip file works. The charge that gir bot sent me was for exceeding the bandswidth on permies, which I was unaware of, but now I know. And that’s why I moved it to being a double compressed file on Google Drive.

OK. This may be a dumb question, but this invoice issue raises a question for me. Are there any rules about bandwidth use for photo uploads? When I first posted photos here, I did links to them on another hosting site. But then I started doing direct uploads of photos to this site, as attachments. I don’t want to run afoul of any rules about bandwidth. I did a search for bandwidth rules but didn’t find anything - not sure where to look.

From what the email says, it appears the surcharges apply only to premium content.

Gir Bot wrote: Hi Dave Burton,

During the past 24 hours, some of your premium files have exceeded the free download bandwidth quota. As a result, we have charged your account a total of $0.02 .

Here is a cost breakdown:

Attachment: Fractal_Trees.zip (File size: 215,005,724 bytes)
Download: 215,005,724 bytes
Cost: $0.02
https://permies.com/t/103467/Tree-Fractal-Art-Enjoyment#852052

Your file is 200 megs!?

That is a huge file.  

When our server host started charging me an extra $500 per month for "exceeding bandwidth" it was tied to big files.   And I asked Devaka to add something to the system about this.  Since I've been the only person on the digital market with giant files, then pretty much every day I get two emails.   One email is directed to me, the seller, to say what stuff I sold that triggered a download fee (ten cents per gig, triggered every 0.1 gigs).  And the other email is to say "here are all the pennies that came in today for jumbo downloads" - so I can be prepared for how big the overage fee will be.

I never posted about it, because it never applied to anybody but me.   But now that somebody has done that, maybe it is time to sort that out.  

What all is in that file?

All that's in the file is a whole bunch of images (801 images) that are each 2560 by 1440 pixels, each.

This was all part of my attempts to try developing an a passive income stream from digital artwork. I made the images that size so that they would be high enough quality to use on YouTube, and there are 801 of them so that I could compile them into a video with a decent frame rate. And well, I was thinking that giving away all the files for a video would be a good way to get the word out...

It is 801 files, like this:

can the file be divided into several smaller files?  Would that do the trick paul?

How about some text when we make the digital market page about max file size and fees?

Smaller files .... hrmmmm ...


How about this:   we leave it for now and figure something out later?  Let's see what happens.  And no matter what happens, I will make it right.

paul wheaton wrote:Smaller files .... hrmmmm ...

How about this:   we leave it for now and figure something out later?  Let's see what happens.  And no matter what happens, I will make it right.

Thank you, Paul! I didn't mean to unleash a whole new problem. I'm aware there's already enough going on.

Dave Burton wrote:From what the email says, it appears the surcharges apply only to premium content.

Gir Bot wrote: Hi Dave Burton,

During the past 24 hours, some of your premium files have exceeded the free download bandwidth quota. As a result, we have charged your account a total of $0.02 .

Here is a cost breakdown:

Attachment: Fractal_Trees.zip (File size: 215,005,724 bytes)
Download: 215,005,724 bytes
Cost: $0.02
https://permies.com/t/103467/Tree-Fractal-Art-Enjoyment#852052

Well, at the very least you can say you've added your two cents!  

Haha! geeze! As cliche as that is, it still makes me laugh when people find a way to throw phrase in there!