Comment by delhanty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delhanty | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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'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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.)

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

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