Verizon Math documents a recorded customer call with Verizon in which agents confuse dollars and cents in a per-kilobyte data rate.
HN links it as a classic example of billing confusion and bad customer support, often when discussing AI or human phone agents.
Your pricing page is not as clear as it could be.
When people read "$0.001 each" they sometimes understand it to be one thousandth of a cent rather than one thousandth of a dollar.
Even though you are completely correct/accurate, people find it confusing (1).
Wouldn't it be clearer to say "1 cent fore every ten uses" (or "10 calls for a cent" or "a tenth of a penny per call")?
Admittedly, your audience is semi-technical, and should parse it correctly, but why not simplify it?
[1] http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/
It's interesting how easily people mistake orders of magnitude when they are using different units of measure simultanously -- in the article you linked, first they say:
give it a mark-up from 0.03p to 95p per half litre;
and then:
In other words, Dasani is less healthy than regular tap water, but at more than thirty times the price.
It's not thirty times the price -- it's three thousand.
It reminds me of a Verizon Math story[1].
[1] - http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/
I care a lot more about outcomes than whether the person I'm talking to is "real" or not. If my bill gets corrected by an AI but not a person? I'll take the AI.
Think of the classic "is 0.002 cents the same as 0.002 dollars?" call - https://verizonmath.blogspot.com/ - I just tested, and chatGPT seems to understand the difference - so maybe this would be a case where the AI is better.
As a counterpoint, I think in cents per minute regarding phone calls. I can translate $0.008 with a bit of thought but 0.8 cents is immediately obvious. Perhaps that would trip up people at Verizon[0] who think 0.99 cents is equal to 99 cents, but I think your units are fine as-is.
[0] http://verizonmath.blogspot.ca/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html
It has to help that he's semi-famous. I remember the exact same thing happening to a Verizon customer a few years back, and it certainly took longer than 5 hours for him to get his money back.
http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html (the audio link has gone dead)
These companies need to learn math.
ah, verizon and billing mistakes, name a more iconic duo.
immediately reminded me of the "verizon doesn't know dollars from cents" phone call circa 2006.
https://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html
https://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2007/08/original-recording-of-verizon-customer.html