My ex cyber security firm did this recently. They gave out forever licenses. But slowly changed things that if you didn’t set up an email with your license. You couldn’t renew it. So once you replaced a device your lifetime membership was gone. They recently completely removed the code input for licensing. So I am no longer able to use my lifetime license I got from working there. Pretty scummy stuff. But the CEO is a drunk. So what do you expect? He fucked up the attempted IPO and did a share replacement strategy instead. Which is probably killing the company.
nope, nope, nope! buy a business, own it’s debt and contracts. CLASS ACTION SUIT!
How do you not know? Do your due diligence lol.
deleted by creator
Lifetime memberships are kind of a trap, for users and a company. The company gets revenue once and then never again. That is great now, but won’t pay your bills in 2027 or 2032. And the company knows that there are users who are willing to pay a huge amount of money for the service and who are using it. Of course the upper ranks will try to find a way to get money from them.
Hell yeah, diablo with guns.
Yep, two years before Borderlands delivered a much superior experience.
At the time I had spent six years playing EverQuest, Ultima Online, Anarchy Online and World of Warcraft in various capacities, and this was looking like an MMO borderlands like thing. Few MMOs had gone under so soon after release.
Apparently the same devs are making a sequel, and I think i’ll make sure to pirate it unless they give it away to lifetime Hellgate London subscribers.
Nowadays I know better than to trust any kind of weird offer like this announced before launch. They’d only do it if they knew they were going to win… or were so worried they were going to go under.
Yeah it was a different time. The gameplay was solid though imo.
What happened to plex’s lifetime sub?
It’s not that it’s gone, it’s that the platform continues to enshittify.
It’s really hard to remove all their bloatware garbage, and features seem to get worse all the time. Subtitles had a big change and they really don’t do a good job of supporting them anymore, as an example. Had one show that no matter what I did the subtitles just wouldn’t work after updating to a modern version that had the modern ‘updated’ subtitle handling. I’ve continued to update but it’s still questionable.
When I got it they never had ‘ad supported plex tv’, now they do and they promote it everywhere. All I want to do is keep supporting what they have, newer modern codecs, squash bugs, and act as a crappy dynamic dns so I can not setup a domain that goes to my home network connection which is a dynamic ip.
What I don’t want is to have to go into settings to disable or hide all their garbage ad revenue supported services everywhere in my private media library I paid a lifetime license fee for. It didn’t have that advertisement when I bought it, they shouldn’t be adding it afterwards, and I shouldn’t have to keep updating my config just to stay on a version that supports evolving hardware.
I tried Jellyfin but it’s even worse for subtitles which are unfortunately mandatory in my household.
Edit: this literally just popped up in my lemmy feed. https://lemm.ee/post/63954487
Nothing
Still there
I’m still salty about Cerberus’ ‘lifetime’ subscription
Same here. I made them refund me and then delete my account. It was a small amount, but I was pissed enough that I wanted them to work for it.
Me TOO!! i sent emails to support, posted on a google forums thread, this was like what, 13 years ago already?, eventually the thread got deleted, reach out to google support, they told me to take it with them, they never ever replied. so since then i never purchased a “lifetime” of anything
fuck them.
the app was very good though, and while typing this i got myself worked out and realized im still livid
edit: bought cerberus un 2015, got the
Hi xta, Your Cerberus license will expire soon. If you want to continue to use our services please consider buying a license. Click here to buy a license through secure payment! Thank You The Cerberus Team
email on late dec 2019.
I had forgotten about that. Now I’m angry again.
OKAY OMG TRUE I’M SO MAD ABOUT IT. I’M PRETTY SURE I GOT IT FOR FREE ON REDDIT SOMEHOW, I USED IT FOR YEARS AND THEN THEY AXED ME
Why would anyone be stupid enough to not honor them? Now, even if they backtrack, their name is mud. It’s so stupid.
I think a company like this is not planning to linger for years. The owners wanna make a buck for a year or two and then sell it off. If they can stiff their customers in the process, they just don’t care.
For long-lasting companies the motivation would be different. But this is not a world-famous VPN company, not by a long shot.
I mean it seems to happen pretty often. The Curiosity Nebula mess, Crunchyroll had a $10 for the lifetime of your account thing but when Sony bought them they started messing with it. Even Google tried it with Google App domains free tier which they promised for life. I think everyone said fu to the buyout and just waited for the class action until Google blinked at the last minute.
I assume Plex will find a way to start charging lifetime purchasers any day now.
At this point I look for them just to see what sort of train wreck it’ll turn into.
Lifetime services/updates are always a scam. The economics of this are really simple: Nebula is $30 per year or $300 lifetime. That lifetime membership covers only 10 years of subscription. So what’s the plan after that? There’s only really three outcomes:
- They stop providing you service
- They go bankrupt trying to provide you service
- They grow and stay big enough to be able to subsidize your service for your lifetime. I can’t overstate how unlikely this is.
Buying a lifetime membership you’re gambling that Nebula will grow big enough that other people’s subscription will pay for your service. Your membership is a liability for them.
It’s also bad from the other end. Lots of small software devs will sell lifetime updates but eventually need to abandon their products because they simply run out of money.
A service continually costs money to provide. You can’t pay for that with a single payment. Lifetime services are simply incompatible with running a business long term. It’s a bad idea and someone is always getting screwed.
$300 today is quite a bit more valuable than $30 for 10 years.
Sure, but it’s not more valuable than $30 + regular price increases for 60+ years. That’s what a lifetime membership is.
Lets flip that around: For my own finances $300 is a lot more valuable than $30 for 10 years. So if I’m to expect that the company will go out of business in 10 years or so, I would have been better off paying for the subscription.
Lets also not forget that companies don’t take that $300 and responsibly invest it. It gets reinvested in a risky bid to grow the company and get enough people to subscribe in order to pay for your service going forward.
Damn straight. I never heard of this company before but you can bet your life I will never do business with them.
They will just change their name in 6 months. They all just get bought and sold non stop so you cant research if they are good or not. Kind of like those one apartments near a college that always change names and colors to trick freshmen into leasing with them.
Especially when we are talking about VPNs. The reason so many companies are sprouting out of the ground to offer VPNs is because the margin they have is huge.
This is also why if you hit the lottery, you should take the discounted upfront cash payout, and not get it paid in an annual annuity for 20 years. You never know if the government is suddenly going become moral about gambling, and cancel all lottery payments.
Take the money and run.
To be fair, it’s best to not participate in the lottery.
True but that is a situation that doesn’t really apply very often in the “if you hit the lottery” situation mentioned in the post you replied to.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re being smart about the lottery by thinking about which is the smarter course of action in case of a win. The only way to be smart about the lottery is to not play.
The only way to be smart about the lottery is to not play.
I don’t disagree, but I also thing playing the lottery once in a while is fine if you’re just doing it as a daydream or something. Back when I worked in an office, if the jackpot got high enough we’d do an office pool and everyone that wanted to would throw in 10 bucks or something. And I’ve also done the same myself for the above reason but I play at most once or so a year.
That’s the responsible way to enjoy it! But you can’t have any expectations that it’s a good idea beyond having fun with it. And I find that sometimes these posts about how to do the lottery in the smartest way possible kind of detract from the fact that it’s wrong and possibly harmful to think that it’s anything aside from a potentially fun thing to do.
Also because that lump sum is all there is. If you take the annuity they put the lump sum into an investment account and then pay you out of the proceeds (from which they take a cut, of course), and you can get the same returns they get, without losing their cut, doing it yourself.
Absolutely. However, if you are not the best with money, or on the irresponsible side; it might be best to take the annuity. Mathematically it makes no sense to do so, but if it stops you from blowing it all on hookers and coke in two years then its for the best. In other words, if you having it all is riskier than the state keeping track of it.
Even if you’re bad with money, take the lump sum and go get a fiduciary advisor to handle it and give you a regular payout. Being a fiduciary advisor is important since it means they are legally obligated to work to the benefit of your money, not lining their pockets. Using something like a trust is another good way to protect you from yourself.
I mean more like someone who is irresponsible and maybe dumb. I was trying to be polite. Someone that doesnt even know what a fidicuary is.
What’s wrong with hookers and coke?
Nothing… the real issue is all the other money you wasted.
Can’t you open up a trust with the money and put a provision on it saving you from yourself?
Sure you can… but that would mean you are responsible with money ahah
Im talking about someone who doesnt know wtf any of that means. Like the town idiot.
This is going to be Plex Pass in a few years if Plex sells out even more
I’ve had a lifetime Plex pass for many years. I have converted completely over to Jellyfin after trying it.
It’s more involved to set up for secure remote access, but once in place it is so much smoother to use.
This is why the first question is, is it open source?
I learned my lesson about “lifetime” thanks to SiriusXM.
When Howard Stern got lured to SiriusXM they offered a deal where you buy the receiver and pay $500 for a lifetime subscription with unlimited transfers to different receivers. Fat forward to 2017ish when I bought my last car that had the receiver built into the radio and tried to transfer to the new one. I was told that was the last time I would be able to do that and in the future I’d be paying a $75 transfer fee and be forced into a monthly subscription.
Lifetime is a hoax.
Lifetime is a hoax.
No, it’s fraud.
The difference is that one is a funny joke and the other is a criminal act that ought to land corporate executives in prison, if the US weren’t an oligarchy too corrupt to prosecute.
This may be your lucky day then! You can likely use that lifetime sub now!
I did the Sirius lifetime deal a few years offered before the one you did (in 2003 I think?). At the time they called it the “Friends and Family” promotion. It was only $300 at the time for lifetime sub, and they gave you the hardware for free. I’m still using that same lifetime sub today.
I was told that was the last time I would be able to do that and in the future I’d be paying a $75 transfer fee and be forced into a monthly subscription.
This was absolutely true this was the rules at one point. However there was a rule change (via lawsuit maybe?) that allows UNLIMITED TRANSFERS and the fee is only $35/transfer. Its even on the SiriusXM website FAQ:
“Please note: You may transfer an active Lifetime Subscription to another radio an unlimited number of times. For each permitted transfer of a Lifetime Subscription, you will be charged a $35 transfer fee, and the transfer must be effectuated through your Online Account.” source
Your account is likely still alive with your name on it! Contact them and get back into it!
Further, back when you and I bought our lifetime subs the SiriusXM streaming service didn’t exist. It is actually pretty robust now. With your lifetime sub (even without it being on a vehicle), you have full access to unlimited commercial free streaming in their best quality bitrate (there was a time that they offered reduced bitrates for lifetime users but that’s gone now too).
For me, because of a further discount I only paid $230 for my lifetime sub because I got a credit for my previous monthly service and I’ve now had it for over 22 years. So if you do the math, I’m paying 87 cents per month for full in-car and streaming SiriusXM. Lifetime deal was SO worth it!
It’s BS they didn’t know about it. They got the financials before the deal. Even if it wasn’t directly listed as a line item it would have been a part of the expenses.
They still thought the deal was worth doing as it was based on incoming revenue and outgoing expenses.
VPNSecure is the company.
Odd how they didn’t just put that in the title.
Guessing it was a force copy title for the sub and the article wanted you to click. They put it in the body of the post at least.
Oh boy. Someone dig up the Tumblr post I gotta go to bed.
no no no nonononono come back and post it
Off topic: the onion needs to resume making videos again. Their “news” videos were amazing and most of them are still relevant today even though most of them are 12 years old. Also sex house was hilarious. Please bring these gems back 🙏
They have literally recently done so. Just news for now though.
What’s odd is that it’s not in the Wired headline either, this is a direct copy of their headline.
Because zero-click internet kills the revenue model. It’s unfortunate, but understandable until something better comes along.
Would love to see a co-op model spring up where views on sites like Lemmy generate revenue for publications without the click. I.E. pay $1 a month to a shared fund that’s distributed by percentage.
That would require us to pay for Lemmy, right? Or how do you mean? Where would the money come from, sort of?
Yup. Or perhaps pay into features, like full-page content inside the post. I.e. offset the revenue of the click. Oddly enough, that model would replace ads, too.
Yes, name and shame the suckers already in the headline so they get what they deserve! VPN SECURE , yeah, right.
This is absolutely disgusting behavior. “Cannot honor the purchases,” my ass.
I feel like “the new middle ages” really was a correct description of our time. Well, we’re at the dawn of it. All our universal rights and universal truths are going to be subject to who’s holding the dagger at your throat, and we’ll have theocracies, family republics and feudal lords again. The blooming diversity of hell.
OK, this is a bit offtopic, just one can see such behavior in all areas today where they wouldn’t be normal 30 years ago.
I propose “the new dark ages” might be more appropriate.
To be fair to the new owners the previous ones never mentioned the lifetime subscriptions existed and they were sinking the company. Probably the reason the original owners sold in the first place.
It was obviously a cash grab from the company before fucking off, you can’t reasonably expect a lifetime vpn for 30 bucks. Either it eventually gets repriced, or they start mining all your information like every other “free” vpns.
Yeah this looks to me like everyone got scammed, including the new owners.
Yet that was exactly what they sold, this is not too blame in the customer. They built a subscriber base on those purchases which is capital to them.
They need to uphold the contract that they entered in to.
They also said that they were cancelling lifetime contracts that hadn’t been used in 6 months. Hard to see how those could be sinking the company.
Correct.
This is just bullshit being said so the owners can make more money.
Every single person you see who believes it and perpetuates it is a useful idiot.
Due diligence what…?
That’s not being fair to the new owners.
It’s the company buyer’s responsibility to make sure they know about and honor existing contracts with the existing company, and it’s the company’s responsibility to provide that information to the buyer.
It is not ANYONE else’s responsibility to make them follow that. If something like this happens, the company(whether before or after the purchase) was in the wrong.
If the previous owner specifically make sure they do not know about that because they made a quick cash grab, how exactly do you imagine they should know about this?
Not the customer’s problem. Also, fraud.
But probably failure of due diligence because any seller who’s not a complete idiot would rather let the sale fail and let the company go bankrupt than risk committing fraud.
Is this even legal? I mean people paid for the lifetime version.
If the new owners purchased the assets, name, and technology and not the company itself, then it’s beholden on the remains of the old company to honour the deal… Good luck with that.
Except what you’re describing doesn’t make sense. If the new owners purchased all of those things, then in reality they purchased the company. Courts are very likely to agree on this. It looks like a company-wide sale, therefore it probably is, even if someone tries to add a line saying “we aren’t liable”.
But imagine someone could “sell everything other than the liability”. In such a case, the seller would be putting themselves on the hook to pay outstanding debts (i.e., the seller would be liable). And we know they have money – they just sold the thing. So then the seller would pay… But they know that in advance, so they would not agree to such a sale in the first place, unless they were planning to steal that money through creative accounting of some kind… But both parties know all of that that in advance, so they would both be acting fraudulently.
It happens regularly. The most notable ‘tidy’ example I can think of would be when the Governments of US and Canada ‘bailed out’ General Motors. They did exactly what I’m talking about; they created a new legal entity called NGMCO Inc. which purchased almost all the Assets of the ‘old’ GM, including trademarks, names, websites, etc.
The key here is that the selling company was bankrupt. In such a case, the creditors want to try to get money back out of their ‘investment’ so the asset sale is done to cover debts. Selling liabilities generally doesn’t raise money for those creditors, so often after the money is all sucked out, whatever remaining liabilities exist are functionally void. Legally they remain until the corporation is dissolved, but with no ability to act on the liabilities (ie., no money to pay) this doesn’t functionally matter.
The ‘old’ GM changed it’s name to ‘Motors Liquidation Company’ and retained the liabilities. Shareholders of the ‘old’ GM were left holding the bag, so to speak. Technically, it was further split into trusts to ‘handle’ liabilities, but realistically ‘old’ GM sputtered out holding liabilities while ‘new’ GM carried on with minimal penalty.
You can have less ‘tidy’ cases as well, where substantial parts of a company are sold in an asset sale/purchase but leave behind a working company. In those cases the liabilities are not functionally abandoned. Disney purchasing FOX, for example.
Further reading:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset-sales.asp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reorganization
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_21st_Century_Fox_by_Disney
Which is a problem of the legal system around it.
Within most(or all) EU countries this would count as a continuation of business and all previous liabilities (e.g. employees contracts, customers contracts, etc.) would need to be honored.
Why it is done this way? To prevent people from doing exact that.
How many people start companies, rack up a bunch of debt, then create another company that buys everything except the debt?
NOW you’re getting it.
This is the exact reason GM still exists.
They should be refunded tbh.
Yeah, pro rata it from the time they bought it to whatever time deathclock.com says for the user and then using time value of money arrive at a fair value to refund
No, they should get their lifetime membership. They paid the money for the membership because the membership was worth more than the money to them.
A refund on its own is never good enough because of gains from trade. The company broke a contract.
There’s probably some fine print in the ToS that says they can do this. It may or may not be legal but that makes it a lengthier court battle to try to prove.
There are so many ways they can put the squeeze on. Session time limit, throttle fraffic, restrict usage times etc.
Then you can sell a monthly VPN+ subscription and offer revisiting lifetime users 2 years free if they move to the new “better” service.
I’m not saying I agree with any of this, but it’s certainly not a new strategy. They’ve nothing to lose. Those who are pissed off will leave, you already have their money and those who want to stay will pay up.
The VPN company can have their cake and eat it
I assume most companies write somewhere in their terms that “lifetime” means effectively “whenever the fuck we want”.
If there is a company that uses the word lifetime properly they may be worth a mention.
I remember when AT&T had “unlimited” data when the original iPhone came out and severely underestimated how much data people used.
Today, every cell phone provider has an “unlimited” plan and in the fine print says “up to x GB, after which you will be throttled.”
That shit should be illegal.
I’ve seen “fair use policy applies”
That shouldn’t matter
If we had the most basic of regulatory practices over businesses in this country, especially the tech industry, this practice simply wouldn’t be allowed. Even the bullshit doublespeak “life of the product” version
Lifetime means lifetime. If you can’t honor that don’t offer it. If you go back on it you should be harshly penalized.
Looking at you t mobile, rolling stone magazine, filmora, Dropbox, salesforce, mcafee, etc
This should also include if you remove features from lifetime subscriptions and make them contingent on paid monthly subscriptions (looking at you adobe, Evernote, and probably plex in 3-5 years)
I’ve read that laws of most countries have become orders of magnitude more complex since the time when ESG wrote his Perry Mason books.
One could also think that all of the laws functioning in a country at one moment being possible to grasp for one person in a week are a requirement for Heinlein and Asimov’s visions of good future too.
Often touching upon the fundamental aspects like this one - a company sells not what it advertises, but it has somewhere in agreement a line that says otherwise.
While we have enormous amount and volume of active laws that don’t change any fundamental aspects, but function as a minefield for an honest person trying to navigate reality.
A combinatorial explosion if you will.
When the legal apparatus as a whole stops functioning as law and becomes yet another power in the society. In some sense having law is a disturbance, and laws becoming so complex that they are not laws again, but something like medieval privileges, with complex interpretations depending on each side’s power, and sometimes inevitable contradictions, just means that the system of society has responded to that disturbance.
In this instance at least the regulatory process is simple though
Say what you mean, mean what you say.
We can maybe have some nuance over lifetime being the lifetime of the consumer buying it vs the lifetime of the company although that has to be carefully worded to prevent situations like this. But it’s probably somewhat fair that if your company completely fails the product is done. This should be clear that the company has to completely fail, not a “apple sells lifetime subscription and decides the product isn’t viable so they kill it” situation or “subsidiary company of google fails and google could easily partially refund the lifetime subscription fees as the parent company” situation
But I would argue it’s not as much about legal complexity here but about regulatory capture. There are really two forces on this issue: businesses looking to keep a lack of regulation and continue utilization of vague misleading language, and consumers that would benefit from regulation against said language.
The businesses are aligned, obviously have vast resources, can influence propaganda on the matter, and can lobby lawmakers directly.
The consumers are fragmented because of the propaganda and a lack of education on the issue, they don’t have strong representation among lawmakers, they don’t have resources, etc. they are scattered unless someone decides this specific issue is annoying enough to get up in arms about and make some kind of action network over, gathering people and support. While it is a serious problem there are just so many serious problems facing consumers and Americans right now, so why focus on this?
And thus, our regulatory bodies yet again fail us
Lifetime means lifetime
No, actually that is part of the problem, they shouldn’t even be allowed to advertise ‘Lifetime’ without explicitly stating whose lifetime.
In the fine print, “lifetime” is defined as the lifetime of a particular mayfly that has not been all that well-treated.
I’ve seen some saying that “lifetime” refers to product lifetime, which is not expected to be more than X years. So yeah, slimes gonna slime
They often tie it to current offerings. So your plan may have unlimited 4G data for life, but won’t include anything faster/newer. So once you want/need 5G, you have to switch to a different plan.
And even then it’s dependent on the availability of the 4G network or whatever. They’re currently sunsetting 2G and 3G networks, that means a lot of old school devices have to be upgraded or cut off, upgrades come with new contracts.
I guess Nebula should be meantioned then?
https://go.nebula.tv/lifetime?ref=nebulablog
It’s the only company that comes to mind that still offers something like that.
