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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

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.

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