“We’re calling to let you know that your VPN has expired and would like to tell you about extended warranties.”
I was a VPNSecure customer with a lifetime subscription that was canceled by them recently. I was annoyed by the experience, but I also admit that I paid about $25 IIRC and that was over 5 years ago.
I used it occasionally as a backup and it was nice to have, but I definitely got my monies worth.
I also had a lifetime subscription. I think like with many of these things, they might’ve included a usage monitor rather than a carte blanche closing of accounts. I rarely used it once someone told me Opera had a built in VPN but it’d still be nice to have it available. I would’ve used less than 1gb a year, maybe less than 100mb. I haven’t used at all in in the last three years. What harm does my account bring to their financial outcome?
Yeah. I bought it at least 5 years ago as well for fairly cheap. I ended switching a few years ago because I had problems with my IP leaking, customer service wouldn’t back to me, and I noticed the canary page went blank, so I assumed that something happened to them.
I find it hard to believe that it’s legal to buy a company, but not it’s contractual obligations. Seems line a hell of a loophole for getting out of things you don’t want to do.
Yet it is.
You can go to a company and ask to buy their office building. Or the name trademark. Or staff. Or customer database. Or website. And you continue this until you’ve acquired literally everything the company has except the actual company itself - it’s called an “asset acquisition” - so you get all the stuff, but because the original company technically still exists it’s left with most of the liabilities.
Most, because some liabilities thankfully do transfer.In this instance:
According to VPNSecure’s owners, their acquisition netted them “the tech, the brand, and the infrastructure/technology—but none of the company, contracts, payments, or obligations from the previous owners.”
…how you can claim not to have gotten the contracts, yet be in a position to cancel them sound a bit of a, well, lie.
They claim they didn’t bought the contractual obligations, so to be fair they should cancel all subscription and not just the lifetime subscriptions. But obviously it’s just a bullshit claim by some corpo…
If the customers came across in the transaction, so did the contractual obligations. You can’t have it both ways.
Capitalism at work baby
Probably legal (for the buying company) but customers should sue the original company and get paid out of the money used to buy it.
No you probably sue them both.
Yeah, suing just one or the other will have them deflecting and finger-pointing in court. Suing both forces both of them to actually meet at the same table in front of the judge, instead of one or the other deflecting to some distant entity that isn’t in the courtroom.
This would almost certainly depend on the contracts themselves.
Contracts always have some bullshit like: “We can do whatever the fuck we want. Service not guaranteed. We have the right to refuse service to anyone. Lifetime is defined by the lifetime of the service which is defined by us. Can change at anytime.”
I have stopped buying lifetime subscriptions to cloud services unless they pay off within a year or two since you can’t guarantee that they’ll be honoured. Any longer and you stand to lose too much money.
That’s the biggest reason I use Plex. I bought my lifetime pass over a decade ago, because the cost at the time was only slightly higher than an annual subscription. But luckily, you can run Jellyfin right alongside Plex, so it’s not an either/or situation, and I have Jellyfin ready to go in case Plex makes (more) anti-user moves.
Good advice in general; even contractual fuckery aside, you can’t guarantee a company will even still exist this time next year.
The only time it paid off for me was for VPN Unlimited and Plex and even then, I barely use the former and Plex is being enshittified.
Yooo, fellow VPN Unlimited user, how long before they get bought up and we’re in the same boat as these guys 😂
Same is true for any tech thing. Sure, you can buy a perpetual licence for something but if you’re running it on anything but an isolated device then you will at minimum need security updates or the source code to fix it yourself. Same is true for things like console games where eventually the hardware will just die and it may become too expensive to replace it. Even emulation is case-by-case since some games use obscure calls which have no adequate emulation. Software doesn’t exist in isolation. For that, you have to revert to pen, paper and some analog tech.
Do you have a nebula subscription? If yes, what is your opinion of their lifetime tier?
I can’t convince myself for the 300 dollar lifetime but do realize i would totally get the hours out of it.
I have a lifetime nebula. I’m probably about 2/3 of the way to it being positive value, but it’s such a good service that I don’t mind.
I really wish dropout had a lifetime option.
I just have the regular subscription. I wouldn’t pay for the lifetime one. I want to support them but I am not confident enough that they’ll be around for the long term since video hosting is a hard business to make money from.
I’ve had a nebula subscription for a couple years, and honestly I don’t think the lifetime subscription is worth it. If you can find a deal on a year plan it’s crazy cheap, and I don’t think nebula is big enough to be certain it’ll still be relevant by the time a lifetime plan would pay itself off. Maybe if it got more popular, but its place as a more specialized type of video platform, and especially a subscription based one, makes me a bit doubtful that it’ll grow significantly any time soon.
Simplelogin just opened up their lifetime subscription deal. I think I calculated it and it will pay off in 4 or 5 years. I don’t think I will get it though since I have proton unlimited already
The provider the article is taking about is VPNSecure.
