Why my Currect Balance Negative?

I was signed up by this URL: https://linode.com/egee
It said "$20 credit for new subscribers from Egee's Youtube channel"
Then i registered but why now i have -20.00$ in my Current Balance?
Is it normally?

5 Replies

A balance of a negative amount means you have a credit balance. -$20.00 means your credit balance is $20.00 USD.

So everything is fine right, Thank you

Yes, everything is fine :)

Negative balance is misleading. Minus sign usually means debt. In all systems which I used negative user balance means debt and positive balance means that you have some money in your account. It's done like this in ATMs, on sites of banks, mobile phone operator sites, various payment systems. Linode also showed balance in the same way for years. And recently it was changed for some reason to show negative balance. I'm sure that current negative balance confuses not only me but also many other users (example - the original poster). When you see that there's no minus sign then you think "it's ok, I don't need to pay now". But actually you have to. And when you see negative balance you think that you need to pay. Then you pay and balance decreases even more.

Yes, there's an explanation text near the balance but at a glance you don't notice it, you just see negative balance after you paid and can't understand why your "debt" just increases when you make payments.

Of course I can get used to this system. But it's inconvenient that all other systems show balance in intuitive way and only one uses this counterintuitive approach. What is the reason to do this?

Please, consider to make negative values to mean charges and positive values to mean payments, so balance will be positive when user paid more than it was billed.

@gorsash Thanks for sharing your thoughts like this. We really appreciate this type of feedback from our customers, and I can understand how the current format for positive account balance can be confusing to some people. I've gone ahead and passed this information along for further review.

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