When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

But for company use, I'd rather pay for something I'm happy with using personally or have had good experiences with in the past, rather than rolling the dice on something unknown.

I will never recommend Google Apps for Domains or whatever it is called now after they dicked around.

I have. But then I worked my butt off to make it right. If I still failed, then I apologised and owned it. I didn't pretend it never happened.

Companies who make such outrages plans/claims to attract more user (and hence cash flow), can't simply be just forgiven, people invest there time and money on such things. A single mistake (or eliberate plans) by such company waste thousands of hours of valid time/money of users who placed their faith in the claims/plans. There is no excuse to lies,which waste time/money of people.

I see that mistakes are made, and they need to be fixed when they become obvious (usually other people have to fix them than the people who made them). But there's no expectation that making and fixing such a mistake should be free, without impact on reputation and customers' goodwill.

But companies love to put labels on things like this with seemingly little thought.

Offering something for free with the 'forever' label on it is I believe deliberate - trying to distance themselves from others who have offered a free plan, but either pulled the rug once they got popular, or snuck in conditions or time limits.

If they had withdrawn the free plan from new customers, but grandfathered in existing users they would have kept their promise and earned at least some good-will.

You would deserve ALL the vitriol. That's the risk you take. I mean, vitriol is just words and you will live. If anything, as a lawyer, I might go looking for "did they create a contract" as well.

But tech companies promising free things and going back on them, or delivering poorly, is probably literally the worst thing about tech these days.

You want absolution for your mistakes, go to Confession.

For the rest of us, back pressure is what makes our giant distributed system called Civilization work.

It's not because they are evil persons. It's because when that promise and trust is broken, I need to severely rethink about other thing. If they ever comes out with NPO financial report or even a formal apology, I'm fine - I mean I'm mad a bit, but not angry. They tried something and it doesn't work, like every success story (or failure story that no one asks) things do go south. But if the solution of the company is secretly hiding it or even publicly denying it (not in this case but that kind of stuff did happen before), then they are not getting a penny from me.

As making cloud storage free for everyone without ads forever is not quite possible nor sustainable, unless you farms telemetry for money (GDrive, dropbox with insane telemetry found recently). It is purely understandable and predictable the business model will die some day, and it's definitely not to blame them for not being able to keep this forever. This is not QE4 and money is not printed in house. But apology and even a changelog is free and it definitely cost more to try to hide it then be honest with it. That's a misdemeanor to perjury for me.

> But Mattermost is breaking the “free forever” promise made to its customers, and without any acknowledgement or apology. The “free forever” note was quietly removed from Mattermost’s website in the month leading up to the announcement, and is never mentioned in the email Mattermost sent to affected customers. Surely, one can expect better than that from a company whose stated principles include “customer obsession” and “earn trust”.

2) While I admit that I'm guilty of it too, overpromising is pretty destructive. It causes you to have to work harder and give stuff for free to deliver, but that in turn causes other people to have to do that too. If overpromising is very common, then that would mean the market is artificially lower, which is why you have people scrambling all the time doing quick and dirty fixes for everything and lots of companies with horrible work-life balance. It would probably be good for the industry if overpromising were a shameful taboo and not just a simple slipup.

Sure, but I own my mistakes and accept that it's on me to live with the consequences. When a company axes its "free forever" accounts it's passing the consequences of the mistake on to the users. I contend that is making the outcome of the mistake worse rather than better. I don't see how you can argue it's a good thing that people should just accept.

I think it's worth noting, what incentives are at play here. It's not a neutral mistake: By claiming "free forever" you are heavily frontloading your adoption/marketing and I have to assume you are not just doing that by accident.

So unless, in the worst case, you are ready to fail your company over keeping the promise, just don't ever claim "forever".

I wonder if some of the outrage is conflating; - free forever for 0 cost - $X for lifetime access

If I paid money for lifetime access and then some time later that was removed I would be angry

If you offered impossible lifetime deals you should have gone bankrupt before the honest diligent company that did their math and then didn't, not had a decade of eating their cake.

We can't take back all the benefits of fraud, but we can force companies to burn everything to meet obligations so that future ones are less inclined to put on rose colored glasses and start making fraudulent offers.

Classic bait and switch. Embarrassing to find this sort of scam being defended here on HN.

I do my outright best not to avoid over-promising, since over promising can cause harm to others. Consider two parties here: the customer and the the competition. The harm to the customer is rather obvious since the terms have been changed for them. It would manifest itself in higher costs, the need to alter their work, or both. One could argue that they should not have depended upon a free tier, but ... the same cannot be said for the competition which was offering a real product. They have to deal with (potential) customers who were pulled away by a snake-oil salesman. While my wording is likely unduly harsh. Given how quickly the changes were made, the free tier was likely a poorly thought out plan rather than a malicious one, it is important to remember that an attempt to draw in customers is often intended to pull them away from others. You better be sure you can live up to your word.

If we don't call this fraud what stops bad actors from just lying to you to get you to buy in?

> i understand the outrage but remember the people on the other side of that screen are just humans too. many things dont turn out the way the initial intention was (im not excusing this specific instance, im just hoping for less vitriol when i someday make some over promising mistake in future). let he who is without sin…

If you can't deliver what you promised then giving all the money back or portion depending on percentage completed is only ethical solution. You are not entitled to other people money because they fell for your lies. Otherwise I have "electric" car rolling down the hill I'm willing to sell to you.

A "free plan" is one thing, and what you say is totally fair for that.

A "free forever plan", though, contains a promise. And whilst we know it isn't literally true (companies die or pivot, takeovers happen, economies crash etc), there's an element of broken trust when "forever" is not only dropped but the communications around it are silent or misleading about the loss.

I've no skin in the game (or axe to grind) but it feels like that might be the crux of the issue - it's a question of integrity when communicating.

The whole point of having a free tier is to onboard customers and then upsell them to a paid tier. If a referral is costing them money, they are missing the point of a free tier.

Which part of what I wrote didn't you agree with?

This reminds me of the love/hate relationship I have with the Fusion 360 free tier, and maybe even some paid tiers where lifetime is not really lifetime.

Unless you're a naive new entrant into the real world who doesn't know better, it's on you if you're fooled into thinking something is "free forever".

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Agreed, except I can't find any examples of them calling out good business practices by their competitor, so I have to question whether it may be kind of slimy and disingenuous after all.

how does that differ from "late stage capitalism" and/or "neofeudalist capitalism"?

There is zero need to launch personal attacks in this context.

My wallet isn't here to pay for your company's inability to find a market.

It also means that the company is incentivized to continually add features that will lead to new sales, rather than improve existing features to make the product better for previous purchasers.

I want to subscribe to pay for the products I depend on. Because I want to be an important stakeholder in product decisions. I do not want the company to consider me as sunk profit and a drag on expenses from here on out.

It’d be great sometimes to switch from grow to sustain. Instead of going after the next 1000000 customers with new features, just stop and focus on making existing features amazing for existing customers.

No new markets. No doubling ARR. Just chill, make stability the goal.

"A new license includes free upgrades through REAPER version 7.99." from https://www.reaper.fm/purchase.php

(It's been a while since I fired up my copy, so this might have changed.)

One of the things I discovered was that "reliable" in the eyes of non-engineers isn't the same thing. I have a NAS system for my important data because I know it is reliable, I know dozens of people who "have a copy on a flash stick" because they consider that reliable.

You can build "good enough" in a rack that will serve a LOT of clients. One layer of ZFS (1U + 3U) for storage, Five 1U servers, one 2U 10G switch.

In my experience that is 1 failure (that results in an outage) every 2 years at most. When I was at Google I (like everyone) had access to failure information about equipment in the "fleet." Motherboards do fail, but VERY rarely, disks are the worst offender but with double parity ZFS you have a week at a minimum to replace a failed drive. ALL the drive failures at Blekko announced themselves before they failed with SMART data.

So in addition to the colo cost you've got an engineer spending part of their time watching the rack, fractional head count cost.

1) I am at a megacorp. I want to rapidly prototype without going through purchasing / finance / bureaucracy.

2) I have a personal and a work account. I learn something on weekends on the free tier and use it at work.

Both of those have happened (with me, as the user), and led to millions of dollar of business to cloud vendors. In the case of #2, the cloud vendor has no way of knowing that the conversion came from a free tier. In the case of #1, I'm not even sure they tracked it.

I am astronomically less likely to use tools without a free tier, at the very least at the level of validating that the product is useful, and ideally, at enough of a level to get started.

The AWS free tier is almost exactly the right level, but would do better without expiration. It's not costly or usable to build anything significant in the free tier, but more than enough to get started. The one-year limit is an issue, since when I switched jobs, it was no longer usable.

Other scenarios I've seen:

- Early-stage startups. It's dirt cheap to offer free tier to someone with O(0) users, and most stay there. Those that hit the exponential growth curve more than make up for it, and won't have capacity to migrate. AWS courts these hard.

- Education. What people learn in school, they take to their jobs. Especially engineering software companies make hard plays here.

Still, Twitter and Reddit discussions about the game were filled with "don't buy that game. It's impossible to play for more than an hour without going bankrupt". Of course none of those users admitted that they pirated the game, and word-of-mouth reviews of the game became "don't buy it, it's terribly balanced / unfair"

Maybe. I'd use the word 'compensatory'.

Using two apps to access half of my media each renders either one useless.

Consideration doesn't have to be financial.

We run our zulip on a smallish EC2 instance. It's probably less than a Euro/month/employee.

> We fully expect to continue offering the Zulip Cloud Free plan indefinitely,

IMHO, it would level the playing field for honest manufacturers and service providers.

Sure, it would effectively outlaw many types of ads that we see today, but do you think any of the types of ads that rely on hidden fine print are really all that valuable to our economy or society?

But yes, fully agree with you; name + shame.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but a more direct relationship I would hope would establish a better pattern for everyone.

I wonder if they make any money on the 1 euro accounts given the tendency of most people to not use the max resources?

In parts of the world where you can get raw milk (ie not the us) milk sours and becomes something like buttermilk. Some farmers cheeses are made from raw milk that has curdled in this way.

In the us, milk is pasteurized completely enough that it rots instead of souring. I believe this phrase is American in origin, and is intended to be in contrast to the phrase “ages like fine wine”. Whatever the case milk does not become better milk with time.

OP is probably thinking of google photos.

This is about servers, where the hosting bill is footed by the company, until its not.