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Comment by wmichelin | Hacker News Reader

To play devil's advocate here, clearly there are hosting costs and maintenance costs beyond a one time mobile app payment 14 years ago.

Kinda sped read the article so apologies if I missed it, but why does the author here feel so entitled to something that clearly the company feels unreasonable to continuously maintain? They're clearly a struggling business, it feels like this author has a personal vendetta against the company and would rather they go out of business than break a 14 year old promise made from an entirely different internet economy era.

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I think it is sort of incumbent upon you, as a business offering a lifetime membership, to properly invest some of that initial fee, such that the returns cover future operating costs. Many other companies work on this model.

If the bank refused to return the money I loaned them, I would rightfully be very upset. I think it's similarly fair to be upset about a company revoking lifetime memberships.

This particular situation is more of a grey area, but I don't think maintenance and operating costs are a sufficient excuse.

> it is sort of incumbent upon you, as a business offering a lifetime membership, to properly invest some of that initial fee, such that the returns cover future operating costs

We may need a law that regulates "lifetime" purchases. One part is standardised disclosure. The other is putting fees into a trust.

I don't think a trust should be necessary. A plan for longterm sustainability should be.

The streaming video service Nebula, for example, has a lifetime membership. The company was very straightforward with potential customers: this is not their best deal, it's explicitly meant for people who want to help support the company (or who prefer not to have ongoing subscription costs), and they are doing it as an alternative to seeking outside investment money. The money they raise won't go into a trust, but into expanding the business in the same way a company might if it went to seek venture capital.

At the time I signed up for it, it cost roughly 10 years' worth of subscriptions.

> as a business offering a lifetime membership

> If the bank refused to return the money I loaned them, I would rightfully be very upset.

Everyone who bought the app STILL have access to the app. All features they paid for are still available (except if you consider no ad a feature).

The "correct" way to do it is change current app to classic and release a new app but that's quite cumbersome. I would like Apple or Google to offer an option to provide paid upgrade options.

When I bought the app they specifically listed "No Ads!" as one of the selling points.

Which is why I said this specific case is a bit of a grey area (that and the fact that the lifetime membership was initially offered after moving the app to a freemium). I was speaking to general practice of offering lifetime memberships.

But yes, I do consider no ads to be a feature. My attention is valuable

> why does the author here feel so entitled

People were promised they just needed to pay one fee to get the app.

Then, they went to a subscription fee, but grandfathered in previous purchasers.

Now, they've introduced ads.

Their overhead is their problem, they sold me something and now they are renegging. It's like the first thing in the article, not exactly burried.

I hope you never hear about free refills that they have in some restaurants.

You're demanding more than a decade of free app updates for a small sum you paid ages ago. Why can't you instead be happy with all the value you got from the app? We aren't born to be small minded and stingy, look up to greater goals and a greater attitude in life. We only have so many years before it is cut from us.

>You're demanding more than a decade of free app updates for a small sum you paid ages ago.

I mean... that was the agreement between both parties. Really not that hard to grasp.

So how about those free refills at McDonalds? Clearly you have the right to return there every day for the rest of your life and fill up hundreds of cups each time. After all, it is in the agreement between both parties, so go for it!

That's an apples and oranges comparison.

While the timeline isn't explicitly stated, free refills are implied that it's for the duration of your visit. In fact you can see the implication given that's how it's used most of the time.

Telling someone they'll get "lifetime" access for a one-time payment is not the same.

In fact, if I was told I had purchased lifetime free refills, I would expect I could obtain a refill during any visit without purchase.

Where does it say that the refills are not for your lifetime? Now go get that soda which is rightfully yours!

There's a free refill policy at Starbucks too, but it specifically states the constraints, which I used the hell out of for years, and is just part of the deal. It's advantageous in a number of different ways for them, but if it wasn't they can take that out of the contract. Worth noting that it still remains despite lackluster and varying performance in the market; their milk sales would compensate anyway.

"Free refill(s) of hot or iced brewed coffee and tea. Starbucks Rewards members may receive free refills of hot or iced brewed coffee or tea during the same day in store visit at participating Starbucks stores (excludes Cold Brew and Nitro Cold Brew, Iced Tea Lemonade, Flavored Iced Tea, and Starbucks Refreshers® base). To be eligible for free refill(s) of hot or iced brewed coffee or tea, your initial order must be served in for-here ware or a clean reusable cup."

The app updates aren’t free, I paid for them with my lifetime subscription.

They could do what other apps have done and release a new SKU for a new business model or with a new feature set that justifies asking for more money. Reeder has done this, for example.

I think JetBrains has one of the most fair and honest subscription schemes where you pay for a subscription but when you stop paying you’re free to keep using the last major version that released while you were subscribed. I think that’s much harder to do on mobile app stores, though.

But you can still use the app you paid for during the rest of your life. Nobody is forcing you to do updates to your phone, certainly Pocket Cast aren't forcing you to update your phone.

>But you can still use the app...

If we're doing "but"s...

But the original agreement was for updates for a lifetime. Of course people are going to be upset if they were promised one thing and ended up getting something else.

They didn't warn us ahead of time that there would be ads. The patch notes didn't even mention the ads! Shifty Jelly used to have legendary patch notes, but it's been a long time since that was true. And since app stores don't actually let you downgrade to a previous version, your comment is simply untrue.

I think apple and google should allow us to disable updates to certain apps.

I have updates disabled on my Android phone. Every couple of weeks I go through and update what I want.

But yes I don't think you can disable updates only for particular apps.

Anyone who paid shouldn't see ads.

It's a life time membership, not a decade time membership. And OP is still alive.

Why they feel entitled to the thing they paid for is not hard to see. A good question is why an app that worked fine over a decade ago apparently still costs $800k per year to support.

> A good question is why an app that worked fine over a decade ago apparently still costs $800k per year to support

This is what I would like to know. Granted, Google makes it hard to be an app developer these days with constant requirements to update things just to stay compatible and compliant with all their requirements. But still - $800k a year is like 4 full time well paid staff. And that was their loss, so add all the revenue to that.

The real answer of course, is they aren't just maintaining the app as is, they are trying to push all sorts of new features into it and this is what's costing them. But why should previous users be paying for that?

Total Commander has done free updates for 31 years

Except those are not even close to the same type of software to fairly compare. A file manager has virtually no inherent servicing costs to pay compared to a podcast player.

If someone tells me one thing and delivers another I am never going to default to "happy" and be quiet because I "should be thankful" for the deal I did get.

I don't know what world that failing to keep your word is OK, but just because an entity is a company doesn't give them a free pass. No matter how good the deal is.

To my knowledge reneging only applies when it's a voluntary decision. A company that has been sold by its previous owner for generating a 800k loss is not doing much of anything by choice. It's just fighting insolvency.

IANAL and I'm not making legal claims, if that's what you're getting at.

Just on the basis of fair expectations in the marketplace, if you say all you need is a fixed rate to serve me for the rest of time, then that's the deal. Anything short, insolvency or otherwise, is reneging. The mismanagement of the company is not my concern.

And before people hop on and make it sound like people with this expectation are naive for believing a company could offer this lifetime service for that fee, AntennaPod + gPodder.net provide the _exact same service_ for the low price of $0. I gave PocketCasts money, and somehow they turned that into -800K .

I don't know where this mentality that customers owe companies that fall short of their promises grace or understanding come from. When I fall short of my obligations to companies, collection agencies rather than thank you notes usually appear.

The company could also go bankrupt and shutdown. Lifetime subscriptions are nice but notice that in other real-world transactions say a "lifetime warranty" on a stove or whatever is defined as the expected lifetime of the device. I agree that "lifetime" is deceptive marketing, but it's not unusual marketing. It is a bit unusual perhaps that there isn't a defined term for the life of the software or service.

> but grandfathered in previous purchasers

If you bought the app only you weren't grandfathered into anything. You needed to have also bought the web player.

it seems to me that we desperately need to get back to a place where a business is held to their word.

we have come to a place where corporations are calling limited “unlimited” and outright just lying to people.

i have seen people unironically defend this as “well if they don’t lie, then how do you expect them to sell their product?” again, people have said this entirely unironically.

i think it’s far more reasonable to expect a company to be held to their contracts and agreements. normal people certainly are.

i’ll never understand how we got to a place where so many corporations can say with a straight face “we deserve to make money in any way possible and it’s unfair for you to hold us to any kind of responsibility for our own actions”

Back in the day, Pepsi had an ads that claim you can win a Jet fighter if you do xxx. A guy did xxx and tried to get the Jet, but of course he couldn't and sue them. The court let Pepsi win.

So, "a place where a business is held to their word" has never been existed.

But it should exist. This is blatantly false advertising. Of course a jet fighter is a ridiculous thing to promise, but it's still a promise they chose to make. Why make a promise they never intend to keep? That sort of thing should be struck down hard by the courts.

But a life time membership is not an unreasonable promise.

People employ hyperbole all the time, so why can’t a company?

But you’re right, a lifetime membership should really be for a lifetime. But since nobody is suing over it, then it’ll continue to be abused.

What is PocketCasts maintaining?

1. A few kb of playlists and accounts 2. Probably a search service 3. Likely artwork caching

It's not free to run this.. but it's not exactly expensive either.

Many users pay and don't use the app very much. I am sure there are some super users who use a lot.

And most apps continue to sell, make enough income to fund a few devs and keep the services on. Even with a one time payment.

It's not like pocketcasts is paying the podcasters or producing content.

The problem is seeing every single dumb thing as some kind of mega-growth M&A deal when it's not. No, your podcast app won't make you hundreds of millions, sorry.

We don't disclose Pocket Casts revenue directly, but we invest $millions a year in its development and hosting. It gets very broad usage and has over ten million of listening hours a week. There are clients maintained and new features developed for iPhone, iPad, MacOS, Apple Watch, Android Phones and Tablets, and an open web version.

I don't understand why you went with a single licence valid for all platforms. Clearly each client is a different product on each platform, even if it might have the same core functionality.

I don't know what the original price was and I understand why he is mad, but that was a poor business decision. If you overpromise that's kind of on you, plenty of companies have been burned by such behavior.

The company sold an app and refuses to honor what users paid for. If this is allowed, it will become a strategy because it's profitable. Trick people to purchase, then add ads to the 'ad-free' app. There's no logic other than, "we can steal and no one will stop us." They should be forced to honor purchases or publish a new app.

Is Automattic a struggling business? Also, podcasters are paying for media hosting. Automattic presumably hosts a catalog service, but it can’t be that expensive to run.

`Is Automattic a struggling business?`

I mean, everytime I see someone talking about them on Twitter, they are clearly struggling with _something_.

There's no reasonable devil's advocate. The answer is that one-time fee apps are not sustainable. There are ongoing costs with most businesses and one-time fees do not capture that. Therefore don't sell them. Sell everything on subscription or you will eventually fail to serve your customers and everyone will be unhappy. If you're a big business, it's risky to buy open-source applications, so don't do that unless the benefit is obvious.

They promised a thing they could not deliver on and that was sufficient to get enough users that they could then sell the app onwards to a bunch of suckers. This is a classic play in the "sell dollars for pennies and then sell the dollars-for-pennies app to a guy with a lot of dollars who eventually gets sick of buying pennies with dollars" genre.

The one time fee doesn't pay for your ongoing costs, but it does pay for your upfront costs. The trick is to either get other users to pay for your ongoing costs, or to reduce ongoing costs and stop further development.

I suppose you're right, but you have to be very quick in the latter case to fully extract your portion of the surplus or you're just yielding it to a copycat that does the subscription model.

One time cost per major version is sustainable, you won't get Silicon Valley rich on it, but you can make a living.

Lifetime licenses only work in the beginning when you have people buying them at regular intervals, at some point the market is saturated and you need to have a subscription model.

Case in point: Unraid. I have two grandfathered "forever" licenses and I'll never need a third.

Yes, the thing with one time purchase is that it should be as it is, right now. Not including updates and support forever.

By this standard, people should feel entitled to get an update on their fridge whenever a new compressor technology is available (or whatever, you get the point).

Because we paid to not have to put up with this garbage. There's so many better ways to do this - look at nzb360 - https://nzb360.com/

They added a new/better interface you have to pay money to unlock. When they add new features/services you now have to pay to unlock. What you paid for originally, still yours. Want to get access to the new stuff? You can either pay a subscription for "everything" or pay one-time-unlocks for features.

Then I look at serviecs like lichess where they just operate 100% on donations and users helping by adding their devices into the pool of compute for analysis.

"Shove ads in" is the low, easiest, tackiest way to "annoy" your users into paying. Those that already paid once are annoyed the goalposts have changed. Make the app worth paying an upgrade for, don't just go "well it's still shit but now there's ads unless you pay!"

> why does the author here feel so entitled

Because they paid for it.

Automattic are struggling business ?

You will renege on a contract if it’s inconvenient to honor it? Good to know.

It's so sad this view is supported by so many people. So incredibly sad, especially in this community... I feel like we're doomed to become the dreaded "you will own nothing and be happy" society that the technofeudal lords so drool over.

If you don't honor contracts, then you should go out of business, because nobody will trust you (if they're wise, though there are always some people/companies who will be foolish).

If you make a contract that involves you receiving a one-time fee for something that will cost you far more than that fee, then you will eventually go out of business for being stupid.

Yes, there are hosting costs and maintenance costs. So the original deal (pay once for something that costs us ongoing money) was a stupid business decision. Doesn't change the fact that they undertook to make that contract. So now they should be held to it.

And the fact that someone else bought them does not invalidate the contract. When you acquire a business, you acquire their contractual obligations. As it should be, otherwise contracts cannot be trusted in the long run.

If people/companies want to support a thing they think should exist, it is their sacrifice to keep it alive. I don't think as them being stupid.

For the concerns of contracts, you are not alone on the suffering side. Alltogether humanity elevated tolerance to this level, this is not a surprise.

> If you don't honor contracts, then you should go out of business

We're talking about Automattic. It's virtually their business model.

I don't think they owned Pocket casts all the way back then...

Well, does anyone actually have a copy of the contract from 14 years ago? Usually there are clauses hedging against this kind of thing.

Example: I recently wrote the T&S for my Finnish dictionary app (still working on it), and I make it clear in advance that the license was a one time fee for perpetual use for that major version. [1]

I can do this because the app is almost entirely offline, and because for the parts that are, smart cloud infra decisions means my recurring infra costs are low. If I add in features which imply a bespoke server down the line, of course that would probably be a major version upgrade - and a change in the pricing model to boot. But I'd still keep the old v1 stuff up for the lifers.

[1]: https://taskusanakirja.com/terms-of-service/#91-pricing-and-...

IIRC they advertised themselves as "pay once, use forever" in their marketing. So why shouldn't they uphold that?

An advertisement is not a contract, unfortunately. If we're going to talk legal, we need to talk in legalese.

They are (or were, at the time they had that slogan) an Australian company. I am an Australian citizen. Under Australian Consumer Law, an advertisement is absolutely legally binding.

https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/advertising-and-promotions...

So if an Australian ad tells something is "the best" or something similar and you can prove it isn't, you can get your money back?

The link I shared makes it quite clear that "puffery" that nobody is reasonably expected to take literally does not count.

Being told that the app you paid for would be a one-time payment, and then having the service deliberately degraded to try and force you into a subscription model, is clearly not puffery.

Usually subjective opinion isn't binding (though I'm sure there are exceptions to this across jurisdictions)

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