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Comment by jpitz | Hacker News Reader

> It's like if I'd invested $100 in Amazon at IPO, which is worth around $64K today but Jeff Bezos could now but my stock back for the original $100 as long as he offered me half-price on a new Kindle.

What? No. I don't see how those two things are at all comparable.

A lifetime service contract isn't an investment vehicle with variable valuation over time. It is a service contract.

Moreover, lifetime service contracts sold for a one time fee should always be regarded with a fiercely critical eye: without recurring revenue, how is the service provider realistically going to be able to provide that service at a profit indefinitely? At some point, they ARE going to drop it, or they've figured out a way to use that service to drive additional profits.

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>Moreover, lifetime service contracts sold for a one time fee should always be regarded with a fiercely critical eye: without recurring revenue, how is the service provider realistically going to be able to provide that service at a profit indefinitely? At some point, they ARE going to drop it, or they've figured out a way to use that service to drive additional profits.

The fact that FastMail management at that time made the (very) poor business decision to offer lifetime service for a one time fee is NOT MY PROBLEM.

Now, I'll just repeat verbatim what I said in the other thread.

> FastMail made an agreement - $15 in exchange for a lifetime member account.

>Now they don't want to honour that agreement.

>And they've created work for me: What to do about my father's email account?

>I have his email address as part of the domain that I have associated with my (legacy) FastMail enhanced account. They've discontinued family accounts for new signups.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14357905

It is your problem. Which you can now take to court and likely expect to get some form of compensation, since FastMail is in violation of your agreement.

I do realize putting "lifetime" on anything brings heavy emotional weight. But in the end it's simply another contract which, even without any malintent, get broken all the time. If you are the damaged party you can use the legal system to seek damages, if you feel the inflicted damage warrants going through the trouble.

FastMail and you know it's not worth my time to take them to court for $15.

Besides FastMail is in Australia, my father is in the UK and I am in Japan ...

Also, would the court order FastMail to continue to offer service to my father, which is what I want. I very much doubt that. FastMail would just be allowed to make the offer of the $15 plus some half-price deal on another plan, which they have done already.

On the other hand, companies do seem to rather dislike bad publicity. So when they try and back-out of past agreements and contacts that no longer suit them, it is far more effective to call them out publicly on forums like this one.

> FastMail and you know it's not worth my time to take them to court for $15.

Now, I don't know the details of the contract, but generally, the value this is about is not $15. The value is the damage caused by them failing to fulfill their contracts, which would be the discounted value of the market price of all future payments needed to replace their failure to perform.

There is no general legal option for one party to a contract to simply pull out and give you back your money. They owe you what they promised in the contract, and if they don't deliver, they are liable for the damage that that causes for you.

Good theoretical point!

If this was about serious money, that's how my lawyer would argue it.

But for $15 I'm not going to try that in a small claims court in the UK say. I've been there once and the judge was one of the most condescending, pompous dimwits that I'd ever encountered.

The point is that it's not $15 you're out of - it's some amount per month for the rest of your life, i.e. whatever it would cost you for an equivalent email hosting plan elsewhere. If that were gmail, and you have 40 years of life left, that'd be $2400 or so.

Unfortunately, I have no idea whether you could make that claim in the UK, as you signed a document which sets Victoria, Australia as the venue for lawsuits. (And that there provides the reason to purchase services from a company that has an EU presence.)

> But for $15 I'm not going to [...]

Just wondering: Where did those $15 come from?

Looks like OP's accounting is based on the sunk cost from years ago rather than the cost of replacing the service, which suggests that they value the service at less than $15.

Well, maybe, but I think it is much more common for people to just assume that somehow a company has the right to unilaterally cancel any contract if they pay back the customer, and that current valuation and stuff simply don't enter people's minds when considering such situations.

I'd think the court would rule that the company should cover your costs incurred as a result of breaking the contract - i.e. they'd either be required to provide the plan for life or cover a plan elsewhere.

Fair enough :) I understand the trouble that goes along with any "small time" contract breach and if this dissuades companies from doing something like it in the future, I am all for it.

I'm not condoning the practice. I'm pointing out that it rarely works out to be truly lifetime.

> What? No. I don't see how those two things are at all comparable.

> A lifetime service contract isn't an investment vehicle with variable valuation over time. It is a service contract.

Well, then you are wrong, both legally and economically?

An "investment vehicle" doesn't really exist, in that sense. What exists is a contract of sorts where you agree on the terms of payment and other benefits (such as control over a company), and that both/all sides have to honor ... and a contract is a contract is a contract. Whether you happen to hold what amounts to a bond, specifically a perpetuity, that happens to pay its interest in the form of email service is kindof legally completely irrelevant to the question of whether the other party has to honor a contract.

Also, it's economical nonsense, as there obviously is a market rate for the kind of email services that fastmail provides, and that's obviously the valuation of that contract to the customer, and that valuation obviously varies over time with the market price for email service. Just because it's an illiquid asset (you can't easily sell the contract to a third party) doesn't make it not have a variable valuation.

I don't know what you mean by 'doesn't exist.'

Shares in publicly traded corporations exist. I can buy them. I can sell them. Their value changes over time. Their purpose is to provide funding to the corporation, in exchange for the perception that they'll provide a return to the investor. It is an exceedingly common thing to sell them to a third party - have a look at the volume on your favorite stock exchange.

A service contract, first and foremost, is a contract between a provider and a purchaser, for the provider to provide a service to the purchaser. It may or may not be transferable. It does have a value, but, much of the time, a B2C service contract isn't a thing that is traded or sold. It happens, but not anywhere near the scale of investment vehicles. For example, I purchased a service, a home warranty. I intend to transfer ownership of it to the purchaser of my house. It was expressly purchased with a third party transfer in mind, but this is a low-volume transaction. I certainly don't know anyone who is buying email service with the intent of reselling them for a profit, do you?

So, how is it nonsense?

He means they don't "exist" in a legal sense. They aren't a special category of things in the law that are separately called out to be treated differently than any other aspect of transactions governed by contract law.

Legally, you buy something under either express or implied terms, constrained by the legal system where you bought it. I'm not aware of any distinction made where a service contract doesn't need to be honored, but an "investment vehicle" is treated differently.

> I don't know what you mean by 'doesn't exist.'

I mean that it's not a separate legal category, it's more of a colloquial thing. Legally, there is property and contract law, and people use that "for investment purposes", but it's largely the same law that applies whether you buy an apple that you want to eat or a share of apple that you want to hold to earn money: You become the (co-)owner.

> A service contract, first and foremost, is a contract between a provider and a purchaser

Yeah, and a bond is first and foremost a contract between a "provider" and a purchaser. And it so happens that bond contracts commonly specify payments in money, but that's legally not all that different from a contract that instead specifies payments in apples or email service or whatever.

> It does have a value, but, much of the time, a B2C service contract isn't a thing that is traded or sold.

Which is relevant to the distinction how? Can you sell a fixed-term deposit to a third party? Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't, but how does that change that it's quite obviously an investment?

> I certainly don't know anyone who is buying email service with the intent of reselling them for a profit, do you?

There is no need to resell for something to be an investment? But even if there were, that doesn't influence the legal status: Even if noone ever resold their bonds and there was no market to do so, that would not excuse the issuing party from paying interest.

To answer you, and the other responder: I hear the point that you feel there isn't a separate legal category.

I'm not convinced.

I see an argument to be made, to the effect that there's plenty of statutory ink on paper detailing rules for how various investment vehicle transactions may be handled. It seems clear to me that perhaps they do have a special space carved out in the legal system, at least in the US.

I do still feel like I need to emphasize - I'm not condoning any situation where a company offers lifetime service, and then goes back on their word. I do think a lot of companies try to extract value from the margin between a broken contract and the pain of enforcing that break.

> I see an argument to be made, to the effect that there's plenty of statutory ink on paper detailing rules for how various investment vehicle transactions may be handled. It seems clear to me that perhaps they do have a special space carved out in the legal system, at least in the US.

Well, yes, there exist some special legal constructs just for investment purposes--but that by far does not encompass all of the things that you would commonly consider "investments". Most of the legal stuff around investments is regulation of market places and banks, to create a safe environment to do investment transactions in--but that's mostly orthogonal to the actual investment vehicles. Like, you can buy shares of a company in a regulated market place through your bank. But you can also buy shares in a one-on-one transaction from someone you know in cash, without the involvement of any bank or stock exchange. The laws that govern the resulting (co-)ownership are the same, whether you bought the shares this way or that way. And many of the laws are the same that govern the ownership of cars and shoes and bread.

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