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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

This actually seems fairly typical for most free or lifetime plans for things. Are there counterexamples of site/services that offered lifetime access that are still doing so 5 years later?

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Tivo has Lifetime subscriptions, where the lifetime is of the hardware but they transfer if you sell the hardware. They aren't always selling them as an option, but they always honor them, and have been for 10+ years.

I bought an original Tivo with lifetime service in 1999 and I still use the subscription today. 6 or 7 years ago they offered a promotion that allowed you to transfer your lifetime service to a new HD unit and that device is still running. The service has cost me an average of $1.28/mo.

I had one of the original Tivos in the UK, and I bought a lifetime subscription.

They ended this service in 2011.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiVo#United_Kingdom

They no longer honour this deal in UK (which sucks, because I loved it).

Yeah, not much you can do about the service ending.

I bought a lifetime gym membership long ago. The gym is (amazingly) still in business and still serves me.

American Airlines started selling a lifetime pass in 1981, and is still honoring them today, although they're starting to crack down on certain abuses of the system.

For anyone interested, there was an interesting article on this subject published earlier this year.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/05/business/la-fi-0506-...

Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Hotmail, etc.

They don't have lifetime accounts -- everyone pays the monthly fee ($0)

Same thing. Just look at the front page of Facebook "It's free and always will be"

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