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Comment by billforsternz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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