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Comment by lftl | Hacker News Reader

As a fellow early textdrive supporter, I'm pretty happy with the value I got out of the deal. I'm still using my free strongspace account 10ish years later. I think there was some email about a free hosting account I could theoretically use with some company, but I never looked into it. Honestly, textdrive's hosting was never really of a quality I could use in a professional context anyway. I understand some bitterness, but any "lifetime" deal has to be taken with a pretty big grain of salt, and I'm pretty happy about what I got for the money.

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> I think there was some email about a free hosting account I could theoretically use with some company, but I never looked into it.

We were offered either one or three free years of hosting on a Joyent SmartMachine, depending on what your initial investment was. After this free trial, you would be converted to a regular customer.

Adding my voice to the bitter-parade. Joyent wouldn't be where they are today without us early bootstrap investors. It was basically a Kickstarter campaign before Kickstarter existed. Not only do I feel like I failed to receive my early investor benefits, but WORSE off was how the whole situation was handled. We had to beg and plead to get our data back. The company essentially went dark to all of their oldest, most loyal customers.

It wasn't about the money or the value I got out of it. For me, it was the way I felt like I was treated. It felt like, hey, we've pivoted the company but we still have to support these old users and they are becoming a pain, let's give them a credit on something that's kinda like what they paid for and be done with them. Then when enough people complained, then they tried to find some solution at the last minute and even that felt dubious. Let's try to cobble something together that's barely working for these people and make it someone else's problem.

I totally take the "lifetime" deal with a grain of salt but it wasn't like the company folded because it ran out of money or wasn't successful. It was more like we got successful so we forgot about the little people.

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