this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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[–] [email protected] 29 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

Why would anyone be stupid enough to not honor them? Now, even if they backtrack, their name is mud. It's so stupid.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

$300 today is quite a bit more valuable than $30 for 10 years.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Damn straight. I never heard of this company before but you can bet your life I will never do business with them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

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.