My ex cyber security firm did this recently. They gave out forever licenses. But slowly changed things that if you didn’t set up an email with your license. You couldn’t renew it. So once you replaced a device your lifetime membership was gone. They recently completely removed the code input for licensing. So I am no longer able to use my lifetime license I got from working there. Pretty scummy stuff. But the CEO is a drunk. So what do you expect? He fucked up the attempted IPO and did a share replacement strategy instead. Which is probably killing the company.
this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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nope, nope, nope! buy a business, own it's debt and contracts. CLASS ACTION SUIT!
How do you not know? Do your due diligence lol.
I'm still salty about Cerberus' 'lifetime' subscription
Me TOO!! i sent emails to support, posted on a google forums thread, this was like what, 13 years ago already?, eventually the thread got deleted, reach out to google support, they told me to take it with them, they never ever replied. so since then i never purchased a "lifetime" of anything
fuck them.
the app was very good though, and while typing this i got myself worked out and realized im still livid
edit: bought cerberus un 2015, got the
Hi xta, Your Cerberus license will expire soon. If you want to continue to use our services please consider buying a license. Click here to buy a license through secure payment! Thank You The Cerberus Team
email on late dec 2019.
OKAY OMG TRUE I'M SO MAD ABOUT IT. I'M PRETTY SURE I GOT IT FOR FREE ON REDDIT SOMEHOW, I USED IT FOR YEARS AND THEN THEY AXED ME
I had forgotten about that. Now I'm angry again.
Hellgate London Lifetime sub owner here. Also lifetime plex pass.
Can pretty much guarantee they will make sure not to honor this. Lifetime subs for things are always a cash grab, if it goes too much in favor of the purchaser they will find ways to make the deal better for them.
Hell yeah, diablo with guns.
Yep, two years before Borderlands delivered a much superior experience.
At the time I had spent six years playing EverQuest, Ultima Online, Anarchy Online and World of Warcraft in various capacities, and this was looking like an MMO borderlands like thing. Few MMOs had gone under so soon after release.
Apparently the same devs are making a sequel, and I think i'll make sure to pirate it unless they give it away to lifetime Hellgate London subscribers.
Nowadays I know better than to trust any kind of weird offer like this announced before launch. They'd only do it if they knew they were going to win... or were so worried they were going to go under.
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What happened to plex’s lifetime sub?
It's not that it's gone, it's that the platform continues to enshittify.
It's really hard to remove all their bloatware garbage, and features seem to get worse all the time. Subtitles had a big change and they really don't do a good job of supporting them anymore, as an example. Had one show that no matter what I did the subtitles just wouldn't work after updating to a modern version that had the modern 'updated' subtitle handling. I've continued to update but it's still questionable.
When I got it they never had 'ad supported plex tv', now they do and they promote it everywhere. All I want to do is keep supporting what they have, newer modern codecs, squash bugs, and act as a crappy dynamic dns so I can not setup a domain that goes to my home network connection which is a dynamic ip.
What I don't want is to have to go into settings to disable or hide all their garbage ad revenue supported services everywhere in my private media library I paid a lifetime license fee for. It didn't have that advertisement when I bought it, they shouldn't be adding it afterwards, and I shouldn't have to keep updating my config just to stay on a version that supports evolving hardware.
I tried Jellyfin but it's even worse for subtitles which are unfortunately mandatory in my household.
Edit: this literally just popped up in my lemmy feed. https://lemm.ee/post/63954487
Nothing
Still there
Why would anyone be stupid enough to not honor them? Now, even if they backtrack, their name is mud. It's so stupid.
I think a company like this is not planning to linger for years. The owners wanna make a buck for a year or two and then sell it off. If they can stiff their customers in the process, they just don't care.
For long-lasting companies the motivation would be different. But this is not a world-famous VPN company, not by a long shot.
I mean it seems to happen pretty often. The Curiosity Nebula mess, Crunchyroll had a $10 for the lifetime of your account thing but when Sony bought them they started messing with it. Even Google tried it with Google App domains free tier which they promised for life. I think everyone said fu to the buyout and just waited for the class action until Google blinked at the last minute.
I assume Plex will find a way to start charging lifetime purchasers any day now.
At this point I look for them just to see what sort of train wreck it'll turn into.
Lifetime services/updates are always a scam. The economics of this are really simple: Nebula is $30 per year or $300 lifetime. That lifetime membership covers only 10 years of subscription. So what's the plan after that? There's only really three outcomes:
- They stop providing you service
- They go bankrupt trying to provide you service
- They grow and stay big enough to be able to subsidize your service for your lifetime. I can't overstate how unlikely this is.
Buying a lifetime membership you're gambling that Nebula will grow big enough that other people's subscription will pay for your service. Your membership is a liability for them.
It's also bad from the other end. Lots of small software devs will sell lifetime updates but eventually need to abandon their products because they simply run out of money.
A service continually costs money to provide. You can't pay for that with a single payment. Lifetime services are simply incompatible with running a business long term. It's a bad idea and someone is always getting screwed.
$300 today is quite a bit more valuable than $30 for 10 years.
Sure, but it's not more valuable than $30 + regular price increases for 60+ years. That's what a lifetime membership is.
Lets flip that around: For my own finances $300 is a lot more valuable than $30 for 10 years. So if I'm to expect that the company will go out of business in 10 years or so, I would have been better off paying for the subscription.
Lets also not forget that companies don't take that $300 and responsibly invest it. It gets reinvested in a risky bid to grow the company and get enough people to subscribe in order to pay for your service going forward.
Especially when we are talking about VPNs. The reason so many companies are sprouting out of the ground to offer VPNs is because the margin they have is huge.
Damn straight. I never heard of this company before but you can bet your life I will never do business with them.
They will just change their name in 6 months. They all just get bought and sold non stop so you cant research if they are good or not. Kind of like those one apartments near a college that always change names and colors to trick freshmen into leasing with them.
This is also why if you hit the lottery, you should take the discounted upfront cash payout, and not get it paid in an annual annuity for 20 years. You never know if the government is suddenly going become moral about gambling, and cancel all lottery payments.
Take the money and run.
To be fair, it's best to not participate in the lottery.
True but that is a situation that doesn't really apply very often in the "if you hit the lottery" situation mentioned in the post you replied to.
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Also because that lump sum is all there is. If you take the annuity they put the lump sum into an investment account and then pay you out of the proceeds (from which they take a cut, of course), and you can get the same returns they get, without losing their cut, doing it yourself.
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This is going to be Plex Pass in a few years if Plex sells out even more
I’ve had a lifetime Plex pass for many years. I have converted completely over to Jellyfin after trying it.
It’s more involved to set up for secure remote access, but once in place it is so much smoother to use.
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It’s BS they didn’t know about it. They got the financials before the deal. Even if it wasn’t directly listed as a line item it would have been a part of the expenses.
They still thought the deal was worth doing as it was based on incoming revenue and outgoing expenses.
I learned my lesson about “lifetime” thanks to SiriusXM.
When Howard Stern got lured to SiriusXM they offered a deal where you buy the receiver and pay $500 for a lifetime subscription with unlimited transfers to different receivers. Fat forward to 2017ish when I bought my last car that had the receiver built into the radio and tried to transfer to the new one. I was told that was the last time I would be able to do that and in the future I’d be paying a $75 transfer fee and be forced into a monthly subscription.
Lifetime is a hoax.
Lifetime is a hoax.
No, it's fraud.
The difference is that one is a funny joke and the other is a criminal act that ought to land corporate executives in prison, if the US weren't an oligarchy too corrupt to prosecute.
This may be your lucky day then! You can likely use that lifetime sub now!
I did the Sirius lifetime deal a few years offered before the one you did (in 2003 I think?). At the time they called it the "Friends and Family" promotion. It was only $300 at the time for lifetime sub, and they gave you the hardware for free. I'm still using that same lifetime sub today.
I was told that was the last time I would be able to do that and in the future I’d be paying a $75 transfer fee and be forced into a monthly subscription.
This was absolutely true this was the rules at one point. However there was a rule change (via lawsuit maybe?) that allows UNLIMITED TRANSFERS and the fee is only $35/transfer. Its even on the SiriusXM website FAQ:
"Please note: You may transfer an active Lifetime Subscription to another radio an unlimited number of times. For each permitted transfer of a Lifetime Subscription, you will be charged a $35 transfer fee, and the transfer must be effectuated through your Online Account." source
Your account is likely still alive with your name on it! Contact them and get back into it!
Further, back when you and I bought our lifetime subs the SiriusXM streaming service didn't exist. It is actually pretty robust now. With your lifetime sub (even without it being on a vehicle), you have full access to unlimited commercial free streaming in their best quality bitrate (there was a time that they offered reduced bitrates for lifetime users but that's gone now too).
For me, because of a further discount I only paid $230 for my lifetime sub because I got a credit for my previous monthly service and I've now had it for over 22 years. So if you do the math, I'm paying 87 cents per month for full in-car and streaming SiriusXM. Lifetime deal was SO worth it!
Yes, name and shame the suckers already in the headline so they get what they deserve! VPN SECURE , yeah, right.
This is absolutely disgusting behavior. "Cannot honor the purchases," my ass.
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