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Comment by MartinMond | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't Breeze sold as "Pay once - use forever"? It's a joke that they now just cop out via "yeah we'll refund your money".

Compare this to Backpack that was also discontinued but since it's paid for monthly, 37signals decided to let existing customers continue to pay and receive their service.

So Backpack stays alive (albeit without new signups) since it continues to make them money, but Breeze gets closed and all customers get shafted. Even thought Breeze was sold as "forever" while Backpack was sold as "monthly".

And let's not forget that Backpack needs a lot more (security) updates and maintenance than a simple mail server for mailing lists.

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How is that a cop out? You get your money back so whatever use you got from it was effectively free apart from the minor inconvenience of moving over to another service (which they are kind enough to make suggestions for).

Because it was sold as "just pay once and get your mailing list", not as "just pay once and get your mailing list for a few months then no more mailing list"

I think that's exactly right, the transaction pitched to customers is not what it turned out to be, and that's never good, no matter how it's communicated.

I think people are choosing to see this from 37S (or any other software co's) perspective. Fine, whatever 37S's expectations were to begin with didn't work out, so 37S is closing the service. Makes perfect sense, and godspeed, 37S. But the other side of a transaction is a customer that put money, time and effort into this product. Even if 37S gives back the money, the customer isn't made completely whole; I don't think it's illogical to think folks wouldn't be completely happy with this outcome, no matter how great of a job 37S did communicating the closing.

I don't know if it is reasonable to expect the customer to be made completely whole. Nothing in this world is permanent.

If my favorite coffeeshop closes I am inconvenienced because maybe I now have to walk further for worse coffee, but they don't really owe me anything.

It's not like alternatives are hard to find either.

They don't have to make the customer whole, i'm just saying we shouldn't expect customers to be happy just because they got their money back.

Which is why they are refunding money, which negates the "just pay once" aspect.

yeah, but the customer didn't want the money, they wanted the service. That's why they gave the money in the first place.

Obviously it's a very good showing that 37S is refunding customers their money, but I wouldn't be completely happy if I were a customer since what I was promised (the service) is no longer being delivered. I would feel a little burned.

Do this often enough, and customer trust is eroded. How many folks are going to think twice before signing up for 37S next new product? I would.

They gave a full refund without being asked, exported data, and gave their customers suggestion so I don't think that they could have handled this any better.

I'd like to know how breeze customers feel about it.

Which is part of the reason they are closing the service, they can't provide the service they promised to provide.

Of course they could provide the service. They still provide Backpack for existing customers. They just don't want to because they don't care.

The economics are different, backpack customers I assume still pay to use the service so there's a revenue stream to maintain a small customer base. Breeze customers already paid, so if they kept supporting existing breeze customers they'd be doing it for free (no new breeze money coming in). This is another reason why I never understood the pay once, use forever pricing scheme for saas products, it just doesn't match up with how the product is delivered.

How long should they run the service at a loss for before they are allowed to bin it?

According to the site , they are giving you your data back anyway.

For as long as they agreed to do so. They shouldn't have promised what they couldn't deliver. It's wrong when ISPs do it ("unlimited!") and it's just as wrong when small "fun" tech companies to it.

Since 37s can't run this service until the end of time then it seems reasonable to expect it to end at some point.

In my opinion, the only reasonable time is when the company closes; anything else falls short of what they promised.

Which doesn't mean that closing in ten years or ten days would be the same, of course.

Then you make it less likely that they will consider offering the service in the first place.

Sometimes things just don't make business sense and you kill them. I have killed stuff in the past that has literally had 1 user , it wouldn't seem sensible at all to keep it running simply for that one person (unless they were paying me significantly).

The best way to judge a company in my opinion is how they handle it when they do. In this case distribution to customers was minimized.

I don't see why "not promising to keep services running forever" makes them less likely to offer them. I'm not asking anything but "don't overpromise". Doesn't seem particularly onerous to me.

I don't remember the original launch, but I doubt that they made a promise to keep this running forever. I'm sure they had T&C with the standard "we can discontinue this whenever we want with no notice or refund".

So the refund is actually being generous.

It ran for only 4 months. I had at the time considered suggesting it to my workplace as they are constantly 5-6 years behind in IT and don't really have the staffing to provide extra IT services anyways.

Now I'm glad I didn't recommend it, though I wish the circumstances had been different.

Then they shouldn't promise 'unlimited'. Why not pay as you go. If I pay monthly I expect to have the product for the month. If I pay forever I expect to have the product for forever.

That's a fairly unrealistic expectation. I doubt that many of the products we use today will exist in 50 years time for example.

It's like going to an all you can eat, eating the entire buffet yourself and then demanding they go out and find you more to satisfy your limitless hunger.

That's a bad analogy; eating the entire buffet is truly unrealistic (and by that I mean a biological near-impossibility).

37S promised the product "forever", and provided it for 4 months - even if you didn't think "forever" actually meant until the end of time, I think it is reasonable to assume it meant more than a year.

Sure, but in this case 'forever' should at least mean a few years... surely?

But not only is your partial month being completely refunded, so are all your prior full months. That absolves them of responsibility for your expectation, because you're no longer a customer.

You do understand it was sold as a one-time payment for perpetual use, not a month to month service. Those are very different expectations, regardless how the math works out.

To be fair, they were the ones that took the gamble of a one-off payment rather than a subscription, so should really have stuck to their guns and supported it. At least longer than 4 months.

Yes, you could take the wording literally, but it's physically impossible to continue a service forever. When I pay $5 or whatever to use it forever, I don't expect to be sitting at my computer at 95 doing so.

Of course, still I think the common meaning of "forever" is closer to "until 37signals doesn't exist any more" than "until 37signals decides they don't like it any more".

In any case I think we can agree that "forever" is longer than January to August.

That's a fair point. Although in this case refunds were given so I don't suspect any malice on 37signals' part.

How is it a joke? They paid once and they get their one time payment back? Technically they got to use the product for free.

Recommendation of alternatives were there as well which is excellent.

For free + the setup time for an alternative solution you wanted to avoid the first place + the migration work.

The second part was going to happen without Breeze in any case. But getting all the data out of Breeze and somwhere else properly is a problem created by Breeze closing down so early.

37signals sell to business customers. For them, having someone blocked for a day to get all that set up somewhere else costs quite a bit of money.

Still, I think 37signals handles that the best they can. There isn't much more to do then to grind your teeth and say sorry to current customers.

But they are causing very real inconvenience for existing customers, so all complaints are valid.

I mean, that's really the best you can ask for. I'd hardly consider it a "cop-out" to be refunding the users their money

Seems to me folks should be happy with a refund. If it was a one product company, you'd get nothing when they close up shop.

The fact remains that 37S persists as a company. Inasmuch as that is true, they are entirely capable of offering this product in perpetuity to those who bought it, as they've done with other products produced by them.

If people pay for indefinite use, the company has an obligation to provide for such use so long as they are capable of doing so.

The other responses have pointed out how it's not a cop-out. There's also the fact that this is a business, not a charity.

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