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.
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.
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.
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.
Due diligence what…?
Yes, name and shame the suckers already in the headline so they get what they deserve! VPN SECURE , yeah, right.
Well, any time you buy any service from any company, you’re depending on them to keep their word.
I’m not saying this is right, or ethical. But you’re taking a chance they’ll honor their service.
Sorry if anyone got screwed.
Genuinely curious, what was the point of you typing out all of this to put on the internet?
I don’t know how to say this without being rude.
I’m wondering if you’re a bot that just churns out a few semi-relevent sentences or if you thought this was going to contribute to the discussions at hand? Because it felt like it wanted to blame the victims and then pulled back at the end and I ant fathom why you stepped into the tightrope wire in the first place.
I’m sorry, but did someone having a different opinion from you on something you’ve invested emotional content in upset you? Does that hurt your feelings? Are you triggered? Do you need a safe space?
Tough shit. Welcome to the real adult world. Where not everyone agrees with you, and likes everything you like.
Suck it up, or keep being a bitch.
Lulwut? When did /r/TD start leaking into Lemmy. Did any of what you said have anything to do with what I said?
Are you feeling alright, man?
Edit: seriously leaning towards ‘bot’ at this point. Humans that find their way into Lemmy have generally been much more capable, and much less MGTOW
You’ve never heard of a contract?
Companies aren’t held to contracts like people are held to contracts. One buyout, restructuring, name change, no more contract. It’s meaningless
Is this the case everywhere?
Way to not see the forest for the trees.
I’m stating they don’t always honor the terms of the contract, and change the terms on a whim.
Good luck collecting a check for $0.72 from the class action lawsuit. A fraction of a percentage from their profits.
Depending on the terms and jurisdiction, there may be penalties for not honoring a contractual agreement.
Good luck collecting a check for $0.72 from the class action lawsuit. A fraction of a percentage from their profits.
This would be an issue of enforcement.
Yeah, you’re going to have to defend capitalism with someone else.
🤦
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.
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.
They also take a big wet bite out of the total when you do a lump sum pay out. Then you pay taxes on it too. Oh and of you do the 20 year payout and die they keep it all. You can’t transfer it.
No doubt, but it’s still a lot better than doing the annuity. Half of fuck you money is still fuck you money.
Biggest mistake people do is put it all towards a house for a low or no monthly mortgage. It’s better to invest it. Buy two. One to live in and a multi to rent out.
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.
What’s wrong with hookers and coke?
Nothing… the real issue is all the other money you wasted.
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.
Can’t you open up a trust with the money and put a provision on it saving you from yourself?
Im talking about someone who doesnt know wtf any of that means. Like the town idiot.
Sure you can… but that would mean you are responsible with money ahah
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.
nope, nope, nope! buy a business, own it’s debt and contracts. CLASS ACTION SUIT!
Unless the TOS included the common language that the company can change the TOS whenever they want.
Hellgate London Lifetime sub owner here. Also lifetime plex pass.
Can pretty much guarantee they will make sure not to honor this. Lifetime subs for things are always a cash grab, if it goes too much in favor of the purchaser they will find ways to make the deal better for them.
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
Still there
Nothing
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 🙏
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.
What’s odd is that it’s not in the Wired headline either, this is a direct copy of their headline.
Just saying: Lifetime Licences for Services are a Pyramid scheme
… in what way? primarily selling products to employees?
Edited the comment, used the wrong word
I still don’t get it. aren’t pyramid and ponzi schemes more or less the same thing? how is the original subject either of them?
*ponzi scheme
This analogy makes no sense
I’d say it depends on how much the license costs vs how the service costs.
The analogy that comes to mind is old cemeteries (YMMV, this is from a New England perspective). People buy a grave and expect to occupy it forever. This is a problem for cemeteries because a cemetery will eventually run out of graves to sell. The sales of graves goes towards the upkeep of the cemetery. Once there’s no more space, there’s no more sales, and there’s no more income for upkeep.
Some cemeteries get around this by reusing graves. You rent a grave for, say, 20 years and after 20 years of occupancy your next of kin is asked if they’d like to renew your subscription.
Other places charge a much higher upfront fee and invest it, using the interest to pay for ongoing maintenance.
Other places just abandon the cemetery and let it grow over with weeds.
I’m still salty about Cerberus’ ‘lifetime’ subscription
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.
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.
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
Seems like the new owners got screwed over by the previous owners who “forgot” to tell them that they had a bunch of highly unprofitable users locked in without ever paying them a cent again.
Shitty situation for those “lifetime” subscription owners, but if the company shuts down because the new owners were sold a lie, they don’t have a VPN to use either.
That has nothing to do with the end user. In such cases they should sue the original owners.
The new owners mentioned that in the article. They said it would cost more to do than it would to just shut the business down.
What good outcome do you think the lifetime license owners would get in that situation?
I call bullshit. I bet they knew, but saw it as an opportunity for profit and this is all PR spin.
I have no idea, but the end users should not get fucked because the new owners didn’t know what they were buying. In many countries it is illegal for the old owners to not let the new owners know of such things.
Without being able to offer any idea of a solution though, saying that means nothing. The company either gets shut down and those users get fucked and have no VPN, or the company stays alive and the users have no VPN but have the option to get one again.
The point is there’s no real way the lifetime licenses get honoured.
Just honor them and take the loss. The new owners did a bad deal. In many countries it would be highly illegal to cancel these contracts while continuing the business. Either liquidate the company or honor the deals. Fuck capitalism.
So you’d rather they just close the company down, so then no one can use their VPN. Big brain move.
The people operating the company do not deserve to run it. Maybe they should declare bankruptcy and let somebody who will honor the contracts buy it.
Allowing this kind of anti-consumer behaviour just allows them to juggle the company around to get out of contracts.
Considering how many companies are forcing into their TOSs forced arbitration and waving the right to class action lawsuit, of course this kind of shit was going to happen.
Glad people care this time, pure VPN did exactly the same thing except without the buyout. 5 years into a lifetime plan they said, “sorry, your account is closed”. They were offering 5 year plans for less when I got the lifetime one. They didn’t care and told me to complain to slashDot because that’s where I bought it.
Pure did the same to me. They’d rather lose lifetime subs and save the traffic than foster customer loyalty. They didn’t expect any of us to pay for a recurring subscription after doing what they did.
Why would anyone be stupid enough to not honor them? Now, even if they backtrack, their name is mud. It’s so stupid.
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.
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.
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.
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 $300 and responsibly invest it. It gets reinvested in a risky bid to grow the company and get enough people to subscribe in order to pay for your service going forward.
It’s BS they didn’t know about it. They got the financials before the deal. Even if it wasn’t directly listed as a line item it would have been a part of the expenses.
They still thought the deal was worth doing as it was based on incoming revenue and outgoing expenses.
I have bought a lifetime VPN for 15$ in 2018 or 19, still kicking :)
Dang, whio’s it from?
vpnunlimited
Someone selling their data probably
nobody knows dude :)
but now they charge 200 usd for it
