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Comment by vzaliva | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of Flickr, which took my monthly fee with the promise of lifetime storage for uploaded photos, even if I stopped paying. Of course, they broke that promise. I don’t use them anymore, but some of my friends still do, despite the betrayal of trust.

The backstory is that the company was sold, but I don’t think that’s an excuse. If a buyer is allowed to purchase the business and keep the name and customers, they should take on the previous obligations. Otherwise, they should call it something else or make customers re-register.

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Google Photos made a similar promise. They said "as long as you let us optimize your photos, the service will be free and unlimited". I started syncing my photos and I think 12 months later they announced the end of the policy.

I never paid so I'm not really that surprised but it was a quick about-face.

Was it a particularly fast (or even complete) about-face?

They offered it for over 6 years, beginning in May of 2015[0] and ending in June of 2021, with previously-uploaded photos remaining free still today, and they gave ~7 months of warning before changing things[1].

0: https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/google-photos-breaks-free-...

1: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/11/21560810/google-photos-u...

To be fair, they only made that change for new photos being uploaded. All of the ones uploaded prior are still free.

Which is awesome because I have way more than my drive quota in there.

The bitterest irony about photos or similar is it's quite unlikely they really deleted (or will delete) the photos. I mean. What an amazing walled garden data set for image models. Literally the fuel for Meta or twitter's AI. So here they are sitting on your data, taking advantage, training models, etc.. oh but you want to access the data? Oh no, you didn't pay every month, can't help you.

However it does make me wonder if california's consumer privacy act would cover the right to retrieve photographic data such as this.

Alternately they could have decided to "optimize" your photos down to 320p.

OneDrive also promised unlimited storage space for files, and it just lasted a few years.

Of course, most “unlimited” things are impractical from a business point of view. But I think the burden of dealing with this should fall on the companies making unrealistic promises rather than on the customers.

Sorry, they promised to store your photos even if you stopped paying? Was the idea that you couldn't upload new, but you'd still have access to old, or did you have to pay a "get them out of cold storage" fee? Either way, that's a bizarre business model.

Svbtle, a blog hosting service, follows this business model as well: https://svbtle.com/promise

I've let my card lapse on it for a few months and they never deleted anything (I just hadn't been posting either).

They promised to keep the files hosted forever with live URLs so people could see them. I agree; it is a bizarre business model. I recall they had a limit on how much you could upload each month, so I guess they calculated how monthly fees would cover the lifetime storage.

There was no monthly fee.

It feels like a breach of contract. Of course, there is no (formal) contract between the corporation and the individual user, beyond the ToS which generally favors the corp not the user.

If I have 100M users paying $10/mo on an estimated 3 year term, I have essentially $30B revenue spread over 100M not-quite-contracts and can largely ignore any simgle one of them. But over in B2B, if I sold a $30B contract to a customer, you can be very sure the lawyering would be top notch and airtight. This is why regulators like the FTC and concepts like class action are so useful..and so disliked by corporations. I already note the vitriol directed at Lina Khan at the FTC for example.

Lifetime X is a great promise to make when you're trying to grow, but flickr can't provide free storage indefinitely, and at some point, inflation will catch up with T-Mobile's locked-in price.

I'm fine with regulators punishing companies for misleading advertising or not fulfilling their obligations, buy as savvy consumers, we have to also realize forever deals are too good to be true.

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