VPNSecure is the company.
A VPN Company Canceled All Lifetime Subscriptions, Claiming It Didn’t Know About Them
Submitted 6 months ago by youradhere@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world 6 months ago
victorz@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Odd how they didn’t just put that in the title.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
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.
Libra@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
What’s odd is that it’s not in the Wired headline either, this is a direct copy of their headline.
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 6 months ago
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.
asbestos@lemmy.world 6 months ago
!savedyouaclick@lemmy.world
barneypiccolo@lemm.ee 6 months ago
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.
Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 6 months ago
To be fair, it’s best to not participate in the lottery.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
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.
Libra@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
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.
Landless2029@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
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.
WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
What’s wrong with hookers and coke?
aceshigh@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Can’t you open up a trust with the money and put a provision on it saving you from yourself?
dryfter@lemm.ee 6 months ago
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.
grue@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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 to corrupt to prosecute.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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!
SammyJK@programming.dev 6 months ago
This is absolutely disgusting behavior. “Cannot honor the purchases,” my ass.
Skipcast@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
mindlesscrollyparrot@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
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.
ik5pvx@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Due diligence what…?
obvs@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I propose “the new dark ages” might be more appropriate.
J52@lemmy.nz 6 months ago
Yes, name and shame the suckers already in the headline so they get what they deserve! VPN SECURE , yeah, right.
tabular@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
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.
veroxii@aussie.zone 6 months ago
I’ve seen “fair use policy applies”
ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
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)
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
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.
theterrasque@infosec.pub 6 months ago
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
futatorius@lemm.ee 6 months ago
In the fine print, “lifetime” is defined as the lifetime of a particular mayfly that has not been all that well-treated.
vxx@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I guess Nebula should be meantioned then?
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
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.
turtlesareneat@discuss.online 6 months ago
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.
nostalgicgamerz@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This is going to be Plex Pass in a few years if Plex sells out even more
Zink@programming.dev 6 months ago
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.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
This is why the first question is, is it open source?
por_que_pine@lemm.ee 6 months ago
nope, nope, nope! buy a business, own it’s debt and contracts. CLASS ACTION SUIT!
LordCrom@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Unless the TOS included the common language that the company can change the TOS whenever they want.
por_que_pine@lemm.ee 6 months ago
True but they could shorten it up if they used Eric Cartman’s phrasing, “What-eva, I do what I want!”
Critical_Thinker@lemm.ee 6 months ago
[deleted]topherclay@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Hell yeah, diablo with guns.
Critical_Thinker@lemm.ee 6 months ago
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.
Obelix@feddit.org 6 months ago
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.
pulaskiwasright@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
What happened to plex’s lifetime sub?
Critical_Thinker@lemm.ee 6 months ago
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.
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.
ripcord@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Still there
Evotech@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Nothing
Bamboodpanda@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Why would anyone be stupid enough to not honor them? Now, even if they backtrack, their name is mud. It’s so stupid.
Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Damn straight. I never heard of this company before but you can bet your life I will never do business with them.
Jimmycakes@lemmy.world 6 months ago
They will just change their name in 6 months
orcrist@lemm.ee 6 months 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.
Someone8765210932@lemmy.world 6 months 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.
neclimdul@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
__dev@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
K1nsey6@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’m still salty about Cerberus’ ‘lifetime’ subscription
xta@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Me TOO!! i sent emails to support, posted on a google forums thread, years ago, 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
moktor@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I had forgotten about that. Now I’m angry again.
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Same here. I made them refund me. It was a small amount, but I was pissed enough that I wanted them to work for it.
zzx@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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
Cocopanda@futurology.today 6 months ago
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.
w3dd1e@lemm.ee 6 months ago
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.
aceshigh@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This is also why I stopped prepaying for things. Sure I’m spending $50 more a year but at least I have flexibility.
ModernRisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Is this even legal? I mean people paid for the lifetime version.
Luffy879@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
Just saying: Lifetime Licences for Services are a Pyramid scheme
ninjascum@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I have bought a lifetime VPN for 15$ in 2018 or 19, still kicking :)
hamFoilHat@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 6 months ago
How do you not know? Do your due diligence lol.
glitchdx@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 6 months ago
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.
nucleative@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It kind of looks like the new owners of VPN Secure got screwed - the last owner made all these costly lifetime deals and didn’t tell them. The obligation/liability to service those deals wasn’t transferred to the new owners.
Which means the old owner is probably the bad guy here and still owes these customers for their lifetime subscriptions.
annamiddleton@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is exactly why I’m skeptical of “lifetime” deals - they rarely last. I’ve been using vpn unlimited devices on multiple devices (iPhone, iPad, Mac) with their unlimited device support, and honestly it’s been mostly positive. Setup across devices was straightforward, speeds are decent for streaming, and the multi-device feature actually works well for my family. Had occasional connection hiccups and support took a day to respond once, but overall it’s reliable and good value. Much better than risking a “lifetime” subscription getting canceled.
OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Wasn’t FastVPN caught holding user logs and selling personal data to advertisement agencies?