Technology

Yet it is.

You can go to a company and ask to buy their office building. Or the name trademark. Or staff. Or customer database. Or website. And you continue this until you've acquired literally everything the company has except the actual company itself - it's called an "asset acquisition" - so you get all the stuff, but because the original company technically still exists it's left with most of the liabilities.
Most, because some liabilities thankfully do transfer.

In this instance:

According to VPNSecure’s owners, their acquisition netted them “the tech, the brand, and the infrastructure/technology—but none of the company, contracts, payments, or obligations from the previous owners.”

...how you can claim not to have gotten the contracts, yet be in a position to cancel them sound a bit of a, well, lie.

They claim they didn't bought the contractual obligations, so to be fair they should cancel all subscription and not just the lifetime subscriptions. But obviously it's just a bullshit claim by some corpo...

Capitalism at work baby

Probably legal (for the buying company) but customers should sue the original company and get paid out of the money used to buy it.

This would almost certainly depend on the contracts themselves.

Yeah. I bought it at least 5 years ago as well for fairly cheap. I ended switching a few years ago because I had problems with my IP leaking, customer service wouldn't back to me, and I noticed the canary page went blank, so I assumed that something happened to them.

I also had a lifetime subscription. I think like with many of these things, they might've included a usage monitor rather than a carte blanche closing of accounts. I rarely used it once someone told me Opera had a built in VPN but it'd still be nice to have it available. I would've used less than 1gb a year, maybe less than 100mb. I haven't used at all in in the last three years. What harm does my account bring to their financial outcome?

That’s the biggest reason I use Plex. I bought my lifetime pass over a decade ago, because the cost at the time was only slightly higher than an annual subscription. But luckily, you can run Jellyfin right alongside Plex, so it’s not an either/or situation, and I have Jellyfin ready to go in case Plex makes (more) anti-user moves.

Good advice in general; even contractual fuckery aside, you can't guarantee a company will even still exist this time next year.

The only time it paid off for me was for VPN Unlimited and Plex and even then, I barely use the former and Plex is being enshittified.

Same is true for any tech thing. Sure, you can buy a perpetual licence for something but if you’re running it on anything but an isolated device then you will at minimum need security updates or the source code to fix it yourself. Same is true for things like console games where eventually the hardware will just die and it may become too expensive to replace it. Even emulation is case-by-case since some games use obscure calls which have no adequate emulation. Software doesn’t exist in isolation. For that, you have to revert to pen, paper and some analog tech.

Do you have a nebula subscription? If yes, what is your opinion of their lifetime tier?

I can't convince myself for the 300 dollar lifetime but do realize i would totally get the hours out of it.

Simplelogin just opened up their lifetime subscription deal. I think I calculated it and it will pay off in 4 or 5 years. I don't think I will get it though since I have proton unlimited already