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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

After the rug pull of the Pixel Pass, I'm done with Google. That was one of the scammiest things they've ever done. I'm still fucking pissed about it and it's been a month.

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I hate Google management (as opposed to the company's good products). I signed up for You Tube Premium Lite just 9 months ago. Received by email this morning (below), they tell me I was one of their first subscribers, but they're discontinuing the product and canceling our business relationship without prejudice and without looking back. How has this become a way of doing business?

Hi Bill,

Thank you for being one of our first Premium Lite members.

We're writing to let you know that after 25 October 2023, we will no longer be offering your version of Premium Lite. While we understand that this may be disappointing news, we continue to work on different versions of Premium Lite as we incorporate feedback from our users, creators and partners.

We will cancel your membership on 25 October 2023. Your Premium Lite benefits will expire at the end of your billing cycle and you will not be billed further.

What would you rather they do? Upgrade you to the current Premium plan, raising your price?

Not end it? That is pretty obvious.

They should have kept YouTube premium and YouTube music as separate options in addition to having a bundled subscription. A lot of people have a problem with being forced to pay for both when they only use YouTube for non music viewing.

If it's so hard to offer less service at a lower price, then they should upgrade but lock in the old price for... let's say 5 years.

It's just such an awful, uninspired, sad way to conduct business. There's no actual information in the email "we continue to work on different versions of Premium Lite as we ...". So is there a different version of Premium Lite they could move me too? Who knows, I suppose I need to go and research that myself, they're certainly not giving me any options or offering any kind of sweetener. If they're sincere in their stupid "thank you for being an early customer to our new product we're now killing" sentiment, they should do something like automatically upgrade me to the Premium plan for a decent period, say a year, without raising my price.

If Google had any faith in their product lines, that email would have a big call to action making it easy for a subscriber to switch plans. It’s weird that they just don’t seem to care at all about dropping subscribers, like they expect to fail and expect to be unable to upsell.

Going further into Google’s mismanagement of their products, I used to be all in for anything Nest, even though we’re also part of the Apple cult. We bought everything: the thermostat, cameras, fire alarms, and Nest Secure: their security alarm system. They had a sale on Nest Secure and I thought that they were being aggressive on subscriber acquisition. I was extremely wrong. It was actually a scammy fire sale since they ended up cancelling the Nest Secure product line one month later. To add insult to injury, Google wouldn’t even refund me my money. I had to go through my credit card to return and repeatedly dispute the charge from Google’s Store (already returned / RMA’d the product since it was also defective).

Needless to say, we are no longer invested in anything Nest related including the hubs. We even cancelled our YouTube premium subscription because of this mess. Now, we are completely all in with Apple’s ecosystem. We will never trust Google again for anything beyond their free services.

To be fair, Google is slowly starting to realize their marketing and product management missteps given how they handled stadia. Still, we’re not coming back.

re: thermostats, camera, fire alarms etc.. what did you move to? I'm looking for something integrated as well. I would really love for google to get their shit together, but rational thinking says I can't with Nest one way or the other.

In short, we just moved to Apple HomeKit and used whatever was compatible with it.

There are issues with setup since most of these products aren’t from Apple. However, the fact that it works offline without internet makes it a worthwhile upgrade. The caveat is that you need an Apple TV or HomePod to act as the hub. Like everything Apple it’s not cheap, but I’d rather spend money instead of time, and I just want it to work without the looming threat of cancellation.

not to mention, all that nest hardware is now hardly-recyclable and highly polluting waste.

so long for the environment, i guess.

I am not sure why people think it was scammy? Pixel Pass was a glorified device financing option. Unlike Apple iPhone Upgrade Program where you trade in your phone. The upgrade isn’t free you still need to pay monthly for next two years when you upgrade. You can still upgrade for much cheaper with 0% financing. Also when you subscribe to Spotify or Netflix is there an expectation that you get the same price you signed up for when they increase price? That is the same happening here. For two years people got the Pixel Pass were paying for the device financing + perks. They only paid for device they got and not for any future device. Take a look at Pixel financing cost it is much cheaper than Pixel Pass and when you finance you have the option to trade in old phone and get reduced finance rate.

The tone of the parent post might not have been ideal, but it is correct on the facts. By ending the program, the opportunity lost to subscribers was to begin financing of a new device with a new 24 month contract period. There was no sweetheart discount involved in getting a new device.

To be clear, I’m a mild Apple apologist and strong Google critic, but even I can see this wasn’t scummy. It was only disappointing. (And even then, it shouldn’t have been disappointing. Google is famous for three things: search, ads, and cancelling stuff.)

I don't understand what opportunity was lost? They are still offering 0% financing which is still cheaper than Pixel Pass. On top when you add trade in, it's even cheaper. With Pixel Pass you cannot trade in.

I was done years ago and look upon with admiration those done with them a decade or two ago.

Google is just YouTube to me now. I am amazed at how their management hasn’t seriously tackled the reputational crisis their company has. That being their reputation for abandoning their products to save Google money at their customers expense.

Google at this point is a PR machine for Microsoft and their commitment to long term support and I don’t even like Microsoft.

> I am amazed at how their management hasn’t seriously tackled the reputational crisis their company has.

What crisis? They've got billions pouring in through ads on Search, YouTube and Android. They can mess up everything else and keep axing products that only bring in tens of millions because that looks like a pittance in comparison.

The beancounters/MBAs ruining it as usual. Dislike my negative tone here but what else could i say?

Why do you think it was scammy?

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