Support Case #8179 - Clearwater Medical Overage Charges Dispute

Yeah, so — look, I'll be direct. We got our April invoice and there are overage charges totaling just over four thousand dollars that I do not understand and frankly did not expect. At all.

-1States the overage charges were unexpected and not understood, with emphasis 'at all'. · pricing and billing

And from my side as Compliance Manager, a big chunk of those overages seem to be tied to the Comply module, which — I mean, we literally just got the v2 upgrade notification like three days ago. So I'm not sure what's happening there.

-1Reports that overages tied to Comply v2 are confusing, noting the upgrade notification only arrived days ago. · pricing and billing

It's primarily Comply, but there's also something under Detect that I — I flagged that too because honestly after what happened in March with that outage, I'm not exactly inclined to give Aegis the benefit of the doubt right now.

-1Expresses reluctance to give the vendor benefit of the doubt after the March outage. · service reliability

That's totally fair, and I hear you on the March incident — we're not going to brush past that. Let's get into the specifics first and then we can talk through everything. What does the Detect line item say?

It's showing an overage for — let me get my invoice up — okay, it says excess event ingestion volume, something like eight hundred and forty dollars.

Okay, Sarah, I've got the account open. So looking at the billing detail — the Comply overage is three thousand two hundred and change, and it's flagged as on-demand report generation exceeding the plan tier limit. Looks like a significant number of compliance reports were run between April 7th and April 9th.

April 7th — that's the day of the Comply v2 launch. So we're being charged for reports that — I mean, were we even notified that running those reports would trigger overage billing? Because I went in and explored the new features and ran a few reports, I had no idea that was going to cost us extra money.

-1Says no notification existed that running reports would trigger overage billing. · pricing and billing

That is a really important question and I want to make sure I understand exactly what happened. Marcus, what's the plan tier for Clearwater's Comply module, and what's the included report generation limit?

They're on the Professional tier for Comply, which includes up to twenty on-demand reports per billing cycle. The account shows forty-seven reports generated between April 7th and April 9th.

I mean — yes and no. When the v2 launched, it was the first time we had access to multi-framework reporting. We're a healthcare organization, we need to demonstrate compliance across HIPAA, SOC 2, we're also starting a PCI DSS review. So yeah, I ran reports. I was exploring the feature set. But I had absolutely no warning that I was going to blow past some threshold and rack up thousands of dollars in charges.

-1Describes running reports without warning of threshold consequences. · pricing and billing

I'm checking the notification logs now... I'm not seeing any threshold alert sent for this account. There's a flag here actually — it looks like the overage alert configuration for Comply on-demand reports may not have been enabled by default on existing accounts that were migrated to v2.

Wait — so you're saying existing customers were upgraded to v2 and the overage alerts weren't even turned on? So we had no way of knowing we were racking up charges?

-1Frustrated that existing customers had alerts not enabled during v2 migration. · pricing and billing

It — it appears that way for your account, and I want to be transparent with you rather than dance around it. If the alerts weren't configured and you weren't warned, that's a problem on our end and I'm going to escalate this internally to our billing and product teams today.

I appreciate you saying that Sarah, I do. But I also want to flag — this is not a small number. Four thousand dollars is not something we can just absorb, especially when we're a medical organization with tight budget controls. We're not a Fortune 500 company.

-1Calls the $4,000 amount significant and unaffordable for a medical organization. · pricing and billing

Understood, completely understood. Can we also loop back to the Detect overage real quick before I forget — Marcus, the eight hundred and forty dollars in event ingestion overage, what's driving that?

So for Detect, looking at the event volume data — there was a spike in ingestion on March 10th through March 16th, which is... okay that's actually during the outage window. That's interesting.

During the outage? How are we being charged for events during a period when your system wasn't even processing them properly? We had six hours of no visibility. We were flying blind.

-1Questions being charged for outage-related events and says they were flying blind. · pricing and billing

So we might be getting charged for the retry traffic that your system generated because of your own outage. Is that what you're telling me?

-1Asks directly if they are being charged for retry traffic from Aegis's own outage. · pricing and billing

I don't want to confirm that definitively until Marcus can verify the timestamps, but it is a plausible explanation and if that's what happened, that charge should absolutely not stand.

Yeah, I'll need to pull that from the backend pipeline logs, that's going to take me a bit longer than this call, but I can have something documented by end of day.

That's a completely reasonable position. Here's what I can commit to right now — I'm going to flag both of these disputes internally as high priority today. The Comply overage, given the missing alert configuration on migrated accounts, has a very strong basis for a credit or reversal. The Detect overage I need Marcus to verify, but if the billing reflects replay traffic from the outage, that's also something we'd need to reverse. I'd ask that you hold off on payment on the disputed portions while we investigate.

I'd like to give you a full written response on the Comply dispute within forty-eight hours, and the Detect analysis from Marcus by end of day today. Is that workable?

I mean — it'll have to be. I just want to say for the record, we've been an Aegis customer for three years. We went through the March outage, we didn't make a huge fuss, we understood that things happen. But this invoice situation feels like we're being penalized for engaging with a product launch that wasn't properly set up for us. That's frustrating.

-1Says the situation feels like being penalized for a poorly set-up product launch. · pricing and billing

I hear you, Natalie, and that frustration is warranted. We value the relationship and I want to make sure we get this resolved correctly, not just quickly. I'll send you both a written summary of this call and the next steps before end of business today.