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Google maybe (?) had a better track record in 2014, but if there's one company I wouldn't buy anything with a lifetime guarantee from now it would have to be them.

Lifetime guarantees from companies are wishful thinking, IMHO. The company can get bought out, go bankrupt, etc., and your guarantee is worth nothing.

I find myself not buying lifetime subscriptions to stuff because I find them dishonest.

Do you buy the non-lifetime versions from those dishonest companies, or eschew the company entirely?

It sounds like this was effectively a monthly subscription anyway.

On the other hand a lot of companies have these kind of offers when they're trying to reach critical mass. Buying it in the early stages of a companies lifetime can be rewarding.

But it is always a gamble, yes.

It's always a good idea to determine what object is that we are measuring the lifetime off.

Is it you, the customer? The offering company, or the 'lifetime of the offer' - which can be any number, as here.

^^^ CORRECT ^^^

Unless expressly stated, it’s the lifetime of the product or offering, not the buyer’s lifetime.

Buy a non-stick frying pan with a “lifetime” guarantee on the coating. 3 years.

Wouldn't all contracts still remain valid if the company got bought out?

Contracts need consideration. Basically if the company stops charging you, they don't owe you anything. This is also backed up by explicit clauses that say this.

The exception would be if somebody paid a "lifetime guarantee fee" initially to get that promise of service.

All the money pay since the first day was the consideration.

> Basically if the company stops charging you, they don't owe you anything

No. If they refund the money you paid, or whatever they can convince a judge is the value of the lifetime guarantee (the difference between TYM and GPM prices forever, converted to Net Present Value), they don't owe you anything.

The only right thing to do is to refund all past customer payments, or refund the "value of the lifetime guarantee" (with treble damages for willfully violating the contract?), and add a "lifetime guarantee fee" in future contracts with clear wording to avoud the problem in the future.

If the value of what you got from them is worth more than what you paid, then they can't just refund you what you paid and say "we didn't mean it". They'd be liable for damages for the value to you of the service and you might even be able to get an order for specific performance.

A good example of this is the story of the small number of ticket American Airlines sold in the late 80s/early 90s which offered unlimited first-class air travel anywhere in the world for life.

They eventually had to resort buying them back from those customers for rather more than had originally been paid for the tickets.

And even then you would only get the fee back. Getting any compensation for damages caused by the contract being broken is pretty much impossible in a case like this. It's hard to assign a value to that "lifetime guarantee" especially since the lifetime of this kind of service is determined "reasonably", not the life of the service or the user. It's unlikely that it's longer than 10 years so one might at best be compensated for another 4 years' worth of losing the price guarantee. At maybe $1 per month (assuming this is what they'll charge extra in the future) and given any legal costs this boils down to nothing.

I imagine Google will not go further than giving a gift card to those users and call it a day.

Generally yes, unless the contract contains an explicit exclusionary clause about change of corporate control.

But you assume good faith. Google is not bought out or bankrupt. You would assume that “because a project manager wants a raise” isn’t the cause to cancel products. But Google does.

The company can get bought out, go bankrupt, etc.

Unless I missed some big news, Google hasn't been bought out or gone bankrupt. Those aren't relevant here. If a company offers a lifetime guarantee then it should honor that for the lifetime of the company. Google have chosen not to bother honoring the promise they made in the past, and they should be held to account for that.

If you run a business and you choose to make a lifetime offer you don't get to take that back just because you don't want to do it any more.

Probably covered in the terms of service. They decided to 'end' that service and start a 'new' service, which happens to be very similar to the old service, but isn't.

How anyone could give google a nickle at this point with their 0 customer support is beyond me.

If you run a business and you choose to make a lifetime offer you don't get to take that back just because you don't want to do it any more.

Tell that to Oregon Scientific, which cancelled the "lifetime" weather updates to my weather device.

Tell that Flightradar 24, which disabled the app I paid for, and the only way to get the functionality back is to download its new app and pay for a subscription. If it was disclosed at the time of purchase that I could be cut of at any time, I wouldn't have bought it.

Two stories. There are millions more on the internet.

I believe that XM radio did something similarly slimy to people who purchased a "lifetime" subscription when the service was starting up and it needed cash.

And didn't a bunch of people get their e-books deleted when Microsoft decided to shut down its e-book service? You think you're buying a lifetime of reading, only to find out you were just renting the books.

Google certainly aren't the first company to screw their users, and they won't be the last. That doesn't make it excusable though. That just means they're as bad as the other companies.

to be clear, this was not a case of buying something with a lifetime guarantee, this was a monthly subscription, and a promise that you'd be grandfathered into the old rate indefinitely.

it's kinda shitty of them to cancel it, but not like the situations where people have tried to buy "lifetime" subscriptions to some SaaS product by paying a large up-front cost, and then having it cancelled.

> a promise that you'd be grandfathered into the old rate indefinitely.

Sounds like a lifetime guarantee to me.

“indefinitely” is a huge loophole, not a lifetime guarantee. If that word was used by Google at the time, there is no case here.

whether or not this could be called a lifetime guarantee was not the point of my comment, at all.

typically, purchasing something with a lifetime guarantee requires an up-front payment to secure the lifetime guarantee. it seemed like some people here might have been under the assumption that was the situation with google music. i just wanted to make it clear what the actual situation is.

YouTube music is shutting down the lifetime guarantee is for the product or service life not the subscriber's life. So I am not sure where they are wrong in shutting the service.

I am agree 100% with you. But this looks like a bug.

I am one of the original $7.99 lifetime subscribers. I received no emails or cancellations. My payment for the month was processed last night. Music apps in the browser and mobile still recognize my account.

Same but my billing date is tomorrow.

Same, mine was processed a few days ago. So I dunno, I'm guessing it's not a total cancellation of all folks with that plan.

Same, mine was charged on the 28th, but I had this exact same problem once before where I was switched off and they cancelled my subscription. I used the Google One support people to get connected to the right tech support people inside of Google and got everything fixed in less than an hour.

It's quite possible that what happened was a glitch with their technical billing tables.

Even Google would not silently cancel a paying customer's subscription without some communication.

I just got official reply from google:

I received an update from our specialist. To set your expectation, we understand that you want to keep the old pricing for your membership. However, as per our specialist they no longer have a link that you can regain the promotion pricing. To compensate this, we'll grant you a 3 months free time for your membership.

WTF Google??!?!?!

I of course rejected their "offer" and asked to reinstate things as they were before their mistake, I'm now waiting for their response.

As someone wrote, this might be dark pattern of 'how-to-get-rid-of-lifetimes'. I'm really disgusted by Google.

Anyone can help on this?

That's disturbing for consumers, and of course Google will attempt to force you to arbitrate for remuneration.

Perhaps the Google Music consumers can perform the overwhelming "mass arbitration" denial-of-service against Google that was on the front-page a few days ago?

>>of course Google will attempt to force you to arbitrate for remuneration

Arbiteration thankfully isn't a thing outside of US much. I would love to see what would happen if you took them to small claims court in UK for instance.

At best I'd expect you would get a ruling that they should restore your free service. But enforcing it would be another matter... I expect to see Google Play Music retired (in favour of YouTube music) first :)

In most US and Canadian jurisdictions I'm aware of, small claims court can only award money damages, not injunctions or other court orders. I'd guess it's the same in the UK but don't know. So they could probably award damages in the amount of the grandfathered discount from list price for the remaining expected lifetime of Google Play Music, which would be a very enforceable award (at least after any permitted appeals) since Google is too widely present to dodge paying judgments.

Small claims court (which also exists in the US) is almost exactly the same as arbitration, but run through the government court system.

And a Toyota Prius is almost exactly the same as a space shuttle, except it's not a spacecraft.

All subscription contracts provide that they can be cancelled by either parties with reasonable notice. If that was not the case we would have open-ended contracts that can never be brought to an end, which would be obviously unfair (and in fact such contracts are deemed unfair in many jurisdictions).

In this case it seems that Google's promise was only never to raise the price.

That might sound misleading because consumers are not used to have a company cancel on them (they want to get paid, right?) but that's always a contractual possibility.

All subscription contracts provide that they can be cancelled by either parties with reasonable notice. If that was not the case we would have open-ended contracts that can never be brought to an end, which would be obviously unfair (and in fact such contracts are deemed unfair in many jurisdictions).

That’s not the case, and it needn’t be the case. In common law jurisdictions courts rarely order specific performance. So for perpetual contracts, which do exist, a party would just need to pay expectation damages to the other party to end the contract.

That's rather nitpicking.

On the consumer side perpetual contracts are unfair, and subscription consumer contracts essentially always include termination clauses on both sides.

In the end this usually means having to give reasonable notice, which can also be an implied term.

Now, if you consider commercial contracts in general that's different.

I basically agree with what you said, but want to point one thing out:

> All subscription contracts provide that they can be cancelled by either parties with reasonable notice

Apparently no notice was given. Either way, this seems to me like it's a bug rather than a contract issue

What's unfair is Google offering lifetime deals, getting consumers because of it and then pulling the rug from under them when it's no longer convenient.

Unlike most companies featured on HN, including several which compete heavily with Google, the end-user Google consumer and G Suite and GCP terms have never included an arbitration clause. They did have one in their US employment agreement for a while but were successfully pressured to drop it.

That said, if they already stopped cancelling customers yesterday (my $7.99/mo is still active) as another commenter said, it sounds like a glitch that they'll aim to fix, so a class action would be premature. Some customers have even reported ad-hoc fixes.

They've always been bad about communicating externally in a usefully sensitive way, even when they really need to. This is unfortunately no exception.

(Disclosure: I used to work for Google until about 5 years ago, but I have no inside info on this incident and certainly am not speaking for them now.)

a bit of topic, but what is arbitration and why is it bad? We don't have it here in Europe (or at least is not very diffused).

Can someone eli5 for me? Thanks

It's essentially a private court, where the parties ask a third party to quickly and cheaply settle a disagreement.

When used responsibly, it's great.

It's bad when a corporation requires arbitration (at the arbiter they choose -- which is a conflict of interest) and bans using the public government court system, as part of the terms of service of the product.

It's a contractual clause that forces you to go to a private court like thingy to resolve issues instead of going to a real court of law.

It's not necessarily bad but given that there's usually one party deciding which arbitration provider to use and might even pay the bills and since those providers are a profit seeking organization at the end of the day, it's questionable if they're truly impartial. There's some research that they overwhelmingly decide for the big corp side of disputes but I'm to lazy to look it up and I'm also not sure if that's conclusive in any way (maybe the corp's position really is better?)

> a bit of topic, but what is arbitration and why is it bad? We don't have it here in Europe (or at least is not very diffused).

You have plenty of arbitration in the EU. It involves a "third party" (supposedly outside of the control of either party involved) which resolves the dispute between the two parties according to the law en possibly some other set of rules which both parties agreed to before entering into a contract. This avoids going to the judiciary and is usually a lot cheaper for the customer as well as the loser of the proceedings. The disadvantage is, that in some cases the use of such arbitration voids legal (civil) cases to be made (e.g. agree to arbitrage, you cannot sue).

Some arbitration is set up by law (enacted by law), some is set up by special interest groups to avoid differences between companies within the same line of work and some are set up by companies themselves. In the EU it is mostly the first two.

My personal opinion is to avoid them like the plague unless you have no way to go to court (e.g. no money) as they rarely have solid arguments and rule in favor of the companies way more often than not. As far as I am aware you are always allowed to reject arbitration in the EU and go to court, though that might be more difficult and expensive and not always wise. Contact a lawyer beforehand would be my advise, most EU countries have some form of basic (free/cheap) legal assistance.

See https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/consumers/reso... for instance

edit: list of all commissions is here and https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr/main/?event=main.adr.show... and is about 450 items long

edit2: As far as I know, force arbitration is generally considered "unfair" but this differs per country and might not be applicable in all circumstances. Some explanation: https://www.hausfeld.com/news-press/mandatory-arbitration-in...

Thank you, Yes what i meant was thinking was "forced" arbitration, but is not what i wrote.

My USD$7.99/mo grandfathered Google Play Music subscription is scheduled to renew in 2 days. There's no indication on my account that it will be cancelled.

If I recall correctly, I did run into an issue in the past where it was incorrectly cancelled, and I had no trouble getting it restored at the same price by contacting support, but that was a long time ago, so it's hard to remember. And I'm pretty sure it was partially an issue on my end--my bank was declining the charge or something. When the charge finally went through, it was $9.99 instead of $7.99. I think. My memory is terrible.

I'm not sure when I subscribed but on 8th March and 8th April I was charged 9.99 AUD and as far as I can tell I still receive Google music and ad-free youtube. It says "GOOGLE *MUSIC" on my credit card statement.

Isn't that a breach of contract?

You could class action them

Maybe when the plans were grandfathered their duration was set to 5 (or 6) years with a //FIXME and the FIXME part was forgotten

reason I never opted in any lifetime offer. Company may fail, they may renegade.

Never?

What if the offer is appealing at the time and you can cancel whenever you want.

There was one time I as really into a lifetime offer from Manning but decided to pass it.

> Upon contacting support, the only remedy they offer as for now is to subscribe to You Tube music (higher price and no lifetime guarantee) and are 'investigating' while of course they hadnt provided any solution.

This isn't the case. From the link:

- "So I've managed to rectify the issue and they've renewed my Google Play/YouTube Premium subscription for 9.99USD a month (slight increase from the 9.99AUD I was paying, but hey, still a discount)."

- "I got my subscription reactivated through chat this morning at my original rate."

- "I had no choice but to use the link to get YouTube Premium subscription at my original price 7.99."

1. In many countries the lifetime guaranteed price from 2014 was lower than 2020 price of YT Music. E.G. in most of Europe.

2. Did you have the original grandfather plan of Google Music?

3. Besides, YTM does not have guarantee of lifetime price.

1. Though people are being asked to purchase YT Music, they're being given their original, grandfathered price. They're not being asked to pay more (aside from the person who moved from AUD -> USD).

3. The modern public terms don't seem relevant here. YTM also doesn't have a $7.99/month plan, yet that's what's being offered to you. Is there any compelling evidence that accepting Google's purchase links means surrendering your lifetime price guarantee?

There is a large difference between 10 USD and 10 AUD, about 50%

True but that only applies to one of the users. The other two got their original price, unaltered.