We do this for several good reasons:
- This allows you to limit your exposure. If for some reason your website spins out of control, you won't open your mailbox and find a $1,000 bill. It'll burn through whatever you have on deposit and then shut down, allowing all of us to work together to find and fix the problem before it gets out of hand. Your liability can never exceed the amount of money you have on deposit.
- Holding a deposit also helps us limit our exposure. By holding the funds for a site in advance, we ensure that nobody ever incurs charges for services they can't pay. If we didn't do that, your costs would go up because our members would ultimately have to pay to cover the costs of all the other people who defaulted.
- Maintaining accounts lowers our overhead. We don't have to send out bills, past due notices, or go to collections. That's one more unnecessary thing you don't have to pay for, meaning your costs stay low.
- It means there is no list of credit card numbers or bank accounts waiting around for hackers to find.