Whether single-payment lifetime subscription (or what used to be called simply "buying the app") can be a sustainable business model or not in 2019 is an interesting topic.
But what I want to point out is that revoking something that was once promised to users, ridiculous explanations that the company didn't expect their product to last for so long, and finally deleting comments from their forum is a shitty move that Cerberus should be shamed for. As well as everyone who tries to do the same.
I actually stopped using apps which went from paid to subscription, like Ulysses and Gemini. In some cases, doing so actually helped me find better and sometimes even free alternatives that I can theoretically count on practically forever (e.g. Quiver and good old TextEdit+Git as Ulysses' replacement.)
Why? I just find it offensive and predatory. If vastly more complex products of Pixelmator/Affinity's quality can remain on a pay-once model, then a goddamn text editor can too. Don't give me your pity post about how not switching to a monthly subscription will cause children on the moon to starve etc. It feels like a thin veil upon what often just seems like basic greed.
An optional yearly upgrade model (a major version jump) is also fine, and has been the most common case throughout computing history.
I would even be fine with IAPs presented as completely optional donations. In fact, pay-once + donate-if-you-want would be my preferred model for things like Pixelmator that are still providing free updates for years after my initial purchase.
I'd love to effectively repurchase many times over to support something that I appreciate and use regularly, but at my own pace please, without ever having to worry about being locked out.
> I actually stopped using apps which went from paid to subscription, like Ulysses and Gemini. In some cases, doing so actually helped me find better, free alternatives that I can theoretically count on practically forever.
Seems to me "I don't pay for it at all" would be the exact opposite of "count on practically forever".
> If vastly more complex products of Pixelmator/Affinity's quality can remain on a pay-once model
Unless they can keep expanding their userbase forever, they can't and don't over the long term (though a relatively high initial price helps there).
Historically this sort of software has relied on "major version" sales to keep revenue flowing e.g. you'd buy version 2, then would buy version 3 for a reduced price, there would be churn (and buying version 2 would entitle you to using it forever) but there's a point at which continuous work requires continuous pay.
Many software houses have switched to subscriptions not because that's fun, but because upgrade pricing was not an option (AFAIK it's available from neither Apple nor Google) and "pay once" is not a sustainable model.
> An optional yearly upgrade model (a major version jump) is also fine.
That's a good model, but AFAIK no appstore caters to it. You can do either subscriptions or "only get money once", the latter only works for software which is essentially not maintained like video games (and even that's not really the case anymore).
> there's a point at which continuous work requires continuous pay.
The majority of software has been pay-once (not counting major version upgrades) throughout the history of software, and still is. I just mentioned some major examples: Pixelmator and Affinity, along with Astropad, CrossOver, DaisyDisk, Duet, Final Cut, Motion, Path Finder, Pixen, SiteSucker, Textual, Unarchiver, to name a few from my Applications folder, and also the vast majority of games.
> That's a good model, but AFAIK no appstore caters to it.
There was also no agreement or assumption that the software would work on any OS upgrade in the future. No annual OS releases (Mac, iOS, android); no monthly OS releases (chrome, firefox), nothing. No assumption that bugfixes were included: companies regularly charged for bugfixes in the form of upgrade pricing. No assumption that a piece of software would continue to work while external APIs mutated. No online services that require services, and more importantly, human time to keep them up and secure. Pricing was one to two orders of magnitude higher. To the extent that there was free software, it was almost always subsidized by the OS.
Well, it certainly helped that Windows updates used to very rarely broke existing software.
That this is largely no longer true is itself a problem. Maintaining compatibility (when reasonable) may be more work for the OS vendor, but it creates far less work for all of the individual developers. And reliability for users.
And none of it was remotely denied from running if the company could not keep withdrawing money from your account, even if it did not require any remote resources to continue functioning.
That's a hack, which I mentioned in an other comment: the appstore has no support for this model, so you have to release each major version as completely separate software with loss of history, reviews, links, … and you can't do upgrade pricing.
> You can't "not count" major version upgrades because that's how you make "pay once" actually work.
Pixelmator. Affinity. Again. Also Panic. Final Cut. Motion. Logic. SiteSucker. Unarchiver.
I paid literally once for them years ago and they're still getting substantial updates and I'm still getting the latest version on every machine, without having to do anything except sign into my App Store account.
Panic even let you receive updates for Coda after they took it off the App Store!
The majority of apps I use are pay-once. The majority of games I play are pay-once. The next most common model is yearly-upgrade (Parallels, CrossOver, Path Finder) or sequel/expansion, but even they do not prevent me from using their older versions if I choose to (system compatibility notwithstanding.)
> That's a hack, which I mentioned in an other comment: the appstore has no support for this model
Yet they are all there on the App Store. I have been using Acorn for years and I was able to choose when to upgrade and I always did. I can still access the older versions; the App Store itself shows them to me in my history. They can still publish the older versions if they wanted to.
> loss of history, reviews, links
New reviews for a new version is how it has always worked for all apps on the App Store, and how it should be, considering how updates sometimes piss users off. Keeping the same history/ratings/reviews across all versions is vulnerable to baits-and-switches.
As for links, again taking Acorn as an example, whenever a new version was available, the older versions mentioned it in an alert and on their product pages.
Uh, little note, The Unarchiver and SiteSucker are freeware. You definitely didn't pay for them, unless you were kind enough to send the developers a donation, which is quite a different thing. :)
> Unless they can keep expanding their userbase forever, they can't and don't over the long term (though a relatively high initial price helps there).
And that's okay. People who bought the software can keep using it and we don't have companies that are forever old hanging onto the market "just because that's what people buy".
I saw them touted as ways to bundle apps together under one price, but never heard anything about using it for version upgrades. But I may have missed that, I've never been to WWDC just watched keynotes and some of the dev talks.
Applications like Pixelmator are likely depending on the growing userbase of the Apple ecosystem for their own growth. Should they ever see that growth stall out, expect them to move to subscriptions as well. Also, they have 'disabled' their (pre-app store) apps at least once in the past: I got the original Pixelmator as part of one of the old 'good forever' Humble Bundles and it stopped functioning when they (i.e. Pixelmator) turned off their old license validation server.
That's not to pick on them exclusively: everyone who wants to make a living writing software needs a recurring revenue stream. Even open source developers are starting to get tired of leeches (though it's more on the corporate side in that situation. But barring corporate sponsorship, the revenue is going to have to come from somewhere...)
> * Applications like Pixelmator are likely depending on the growing userbase of the Apple ecosystem for their own growth.*
What about Affinity?
> expect them to move to subscriptions as well.
> everyone who wants to make a living writing software needs a recurring revenue stream.
Why is preying on your current users and pulling a bait-and-switch on them the only option?
If the continued development of a pay-once/optional-yearly-upgrade product really is unsustainable for you, branch out into more products. Or review your expenses. You don't have to live in San Francisco or replace all your computers with the latest Mac Pro.
It's like, "Oh no our single product cannot sustain our extravagances/desired lifestyle, so let's flay our existing flock some more instead of attracting new customers or creating new/better products."
That only delays your demise, because the users will definitely review their expenses.
> everyone who wants to make a living writing software needs a recurring revenue stream
You can have a recurring revenue stream with pay once software. Every day, hundreds of thousands of new people are born who don't have a license yet!
It's really easy to make the same amount of money with pay once licenses compared to subscriptions: just take the average number of months that someone uses your app, multiply with monthly price, make that the "pay once" price, done! Now you have the same revenue but don't need to charge for subscriptions, and you get all the money up front!
Every year the percentage of users willing to pay anything for standalone/prepaid software drops. And the price those left are willing to pay drops as well. The reality is that for the most part the prepaid consumer software market is dead and has been for at least several years.
Why not? The developer gets money every month. How is that not "recurring"?
I sell a software product (pay once with upgrades every few years), and every month people show up and buy licenses. My monthly revenue is pretty stable, and I definitely consider it "recurring revenue".
I don't mind paid subscriptions in principle. If I *using the app I want it to be around for a long time. That ain't going to happen unless it's written by some open source idealist (which is the ideal situation - think Signal), or the author makes some money out of it.
The used to charge $5..$10 for an app. I love that to change to $5 plus $1/year thereafter. I'm not going to notice the $1, and if they have 100K users they've got an excellent reason to maintain it.
But that isn't what has happened. Instead the price has dropped to free, but the subscription has gone up $20/yr. I'm not paying that. I got along perfectly fine without the app before. I am somewhat perplexed anybody does pay that, but I guess there must be some out there that do.
Another thing that some proponents of subscriptions don't seem to get, is that pay-once software competes with each other only once; when I decide what to purchase first.
I could buy App A now and buy App B later.
But subscription-based apps/services compete with each other every single month; they are constantly at risk of me cancelling a subscription – and realizing that I can live without it after all – whenever I review my needs and finances.
I bought a "lifetime" subscription to Feedly when they were starting out. Recently, they added a new feature and didn't give the lifetime subscribers access to it, but instead made a new subscription level called Pro+. Technically, our subscriptions continued with the same features as before(minus one or two things which moved up a tier level). It was just frustrating that the first any of us heard about the new level and features was a big blue "upgrade" button on every page. When I just checked, it looks like we are given the option of upgrading our lifetime subscriptions to the new level for an additional $99. Probably worth it, but I think they could have handled it better by giving us some heads up and communicating with people who are arguably the biggest fans if not the people who currently earn them the most money.
Hello, sorry for the confusion/frustration with the lifetime tier. Let me explain:
We have added Leo (smart AI/ML-powered assistant that helps you save time and prioritize content). It costs $4/user/month to run this and it is not viable to offer it as part o the standard plan, so we have added Pro+ plan and for lifetime users we have offered a unique opportunity to join that plan eventhough it won't be viable for us.
If you decided to not get Pro+ via the lifetime offer, you'll keep all the features you had until now, we're not moving them to the higher plan, only for new users, not for you, never.
Also, you're totally right that the communication was not handled correctly. We have launched it "silently" via the blue upgrade button to see the demand and to fix potential bugs before launching it publicly. We're finally stronger on the marketing side now so you can expect a "real and proper" Leo launch in January and onward. Thank you for providing us with your insights, we can improve communication when we see how our users react.
Yeah, but in this case they didn’t buy into the subscription model—they bought a “lifetime subscription”, which is really just a traditional, perpetual license under a different name.
The legal way to do this is to go bankrupt, launch app 2.0, and market it under a similar name.
They have a ponzi scheme business model, it failed. There's nothing legal about this; you make promises, you sign contracts, you have to live up to them.
We, the little insignificant people, have to afterall. The rules for us and them are the same.
You do this to a few people you lose your shirt, you do this to thousands or tens of thousands, that accousts the public trust. Management should be in handcuffs and in jail for this.
This news site is questionable for calling the business practice "questionable".
The terms of the original licence state that it's revocable. This covers them legally. The issue here is not legality, it's whether it not this is a good business practice (questionable) and good communication with your customers (clearly not).
This is inaccurate. See Section 5(a) of the FTC Act, which provides that “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce . . . are . . . declared unlawful.”
This is an easy case for the FTC and state regulators.
They don't have to go bankrupt. Just sunset Cerberus and launch another app w/ similar features different branding and an easy one-click 'transition' w/ different pricing/etc.
How was it sustainable when we called them programs instead of the current indentured servitude system of subscriptions? Maybe programmers won’t be paid like doctors anymore, but there was a time when it was the only way software was sold and it was a more sane time and the software was of better quality as well.
A major difference is that the programs were standalone. Once packaged, the software was done and required no more work from the creators. They would either switch to making the next thing, or making the next version of the last thing (which would have to be bought again).
This is no longer the business model for a vast majority of software development. Now, software is never 'done', but new features are continually added (whether needed or not) and most software requires a large server farm to provide services for the sold software (or the entire offering)... this is both a design decision, but even more so a decision that requires customers to keep paying for the same software as 'support'
And with devices continually on the Internet, new security threats require constant updates for many apps. "back in the old days" with effectively everything air-gapped for the most part, running the same software version for years was more viable.
A popular hybrid model with programs like UltraEdit and many Wordpress plugins is you pay once to own the software, get free updates and support for X amount of time, then have the option to extend or renew later if you want to. I can still email UltraEdit and get installation links for my copy dating from before 2013, and I did recently (I still enjoy using it for some specific tasks).
> This is no longer the business model for a vast majority of software development. Now, software is never 'done', but new features are continually added (whether needed or not)
Good point - the whether needed or not puts the finger right on the point. The subscription model is funding development of subpar features that aren't needed. This is an inefficiency, and ideally it should be eliminated
> 2. you got what you bought, you could not and did not expect updates
Given the number of user-hostile updates that often arrive somewhere along the way, i'd like to go back to not expecting updates. Happy to pay for new versions when new features are enticing enough.
> Happy to pay for new versions when new features are enticing enough.
And many devs would be glad to provide that, but the shit-heaps that are "modern" storefront don't allow for it. AFAIK neither Google's playstore nor Apple's appstore allow for upgrade pricing, if you release an update or upgrade every user gets it for free.
Or you have to release a completely different piece of software, pray that it does't get rejected as a duplicate, pray that it doesn't consume a finite resource (like twitter application tokens) and can't offer "upgrade pricing" different from first-purchase pricing because you can't differentiate.
This sort of pricing methods remains fairly common for computer software houses who sell their thing directly.
Software doesn't just run on the users' hardware anymore, generally. Ongoing hosting costs tend to be the argument used to justify subscriptions. In reality it's that it's wildly lucrative, but hosting costs play some part.
Good that you have mentioned, I have almost forgot. I will never ever pay a dime for the software, that is running on a 3rd party servers. At the moment I havent found any software that I would need (or doesnt have an self hosted alternative) and needs 3 party server interaction.
There are multiple reasons for that but primary two, that are history proven are:
- I dont trust you
- I REALLY, REALLY DONT trust you
Credentials storage? Any data storage? Yeah right, I have my own server and dont have time to reverse and check your code each update (but I did on first use).
Immediately when you dont support self hosting of my data, you have lost a potential customer, regardless how "good" your application is (typically in this case, it is far from good, developer lacks the knowlidge of how to do it without some major lasigna code on server side or is predatory).
All of application that I have bought are running on complete lockdown from any server (including firebase and other unneeded services) that is not mine. And countless times it was proven as a very good practice.
Salary and quality of work are codependent, remember that many programmer roles would be considered engineering roles, and bad practices could lead to user damage.
> but there was a time when it was the only way software was sold and it was a more sane time and the software was of better quality as well
As cortesoft already noted:> A major difference is that the programs were standalone. Once packaged, the software was done and required no more work from the creators. They would either switch to making the next thing, or making the next version of the last thing (which would have to be bought again).
That is a big reason software was of higher quality. Although the developers moved on the next version or next thing, there was still support.
What I was told as a developer of retail software sold on floppy or CD-ROM in stores like CompUSA, Egghead, Best Buy, and the like is that every time a customer had a problem that they could not figure out themselves in the software or by reading the manual and so ended up calling our toll-free help number, that cost us more than our profit on the sale--in fact, I was told, it would cost us more than our profit on several sales.
This was at a time when only a small fraction of customers had internet access. A larger, but still small, fraction would have modems that they used with some non-internet service like CompuServe or with BBS systems.
This meant that there was no cheap way to get software updates to a majority of customers--mailing them a floppy or CD-ROM would be the only way. There was also no way to get workaround instructions to the majority of customers, other than mailing them via the post office.
Thus it was very important to management that when the software went out the number and severity of bugs was sufficiently low that not many people would need to call help. If the number or severity was too high, dealing with all the calls or sending everyone a new floppy or CD-ROM would probably make the product a net loss.
This resulted in an emphasis on software quality throughout the company. Even if the actual functionality the product offered was stupid, we would make sure it was very good at doing that stupid thing, and that the manual was clear and complete.
Even if we were working on a new product for which there were currently no competitors on the market, and we knew that another company was working on a similar product and it looked like they would get to market first, we'd not cut quality to beat them to market. Being second to market, and so not getting as big a share as we would have had we been first, was better than being first with a product that would kill us on support costs.
Another consequence of most customers not having internet or other online access such as CompuServe or BBS systems is that it was important to get good reviews in magazines such as PC Magazine, Byte, Macworld, since those were the only reviews many potential customers would see.
If your release went out with any noticeable bugs, they would probably get mentioned in the reviews. Even if you did bite the bullet later and send out new floppies or CD-ROMs to all your customers to fix the bug, you probably would not get a second review. People will remember the first review, and your sales will tank.
I think that as a programmer I liked that era better than the one we are now in, for a few reasons.
• I liked the emphasis on quality. If I wasn't happy with my code, management supported making it better even if this would take longer.
• I liked that things ended. When we shipped the product, it was done. I could make a clean break and start working on our next product, which might have nothing at all to do with the prior product.
• If we did decide to do another version, it had to have enough new functions and features to make people with the prior version want to buy it. That was often enough changes to justify treating it as a completely new product which I could completely re-architect if I wanted to.
I am following simple logic: either there is lifetime license (I dont mind paying more) or I am not buying. What non-lifetime license is saying to me is: "We dont have enough features to develop for the future that would convince you to buy update, so we will charge you over and over again".
I do the same. Promising to update and improve is cheap. Having a continuous revenue stream from your users doesn't bring incentive to update. Losing sales on a new version/year of updates does.
The only app I use that offers a lifetime license is the language learning application Memrise, I thought it might make sense for them since I suspect that for most people language learning is a punctual thing: you study for a couple of years and then you either become fluent enough to switch to passive learning or you give up. In this context it might make sense to offer a lifetime license for the cost of, say, 3 years of monthly subscription knowing full well that most people won't use it for that long anyway.
So I think lifetime licenses might make good business sense if you know that the service you provide is effectively limited in time by external factors anyway, like for instance a service having to do with young children or education for instance.
In this case for Cerebrus it doesn't really add up though, and the justification given by the support is absolutely baffling to me:
>Quite frankly we did not think Cerebrus would last that long!
Uh, well, kudos for honesty I guess. So what they're saying is that they sold lifetime licenses expecting that they'd never actually have to deal with they because they'd either go under or be acquired before it'd become a problem.
Having checked my phone the only paid application I have at all, which had a one-off license, was the notification application for pushover.net
Honestly I think I spent €3 on it, and I'd happily pay that a year to keep using the service. My automated testing-utility probes about 1000 ping/ssh/http services every 90 seconds, and sends me notificaitons when/if anything fails via that application.
Pushover has been absolutely robust and reliable, and although I don't expect instant notification in all circumstances I seem to have received it.
So much flack could of been avoided with a more sincere explanation and apology. Tell you customers you meant well but made mistakes. Ongoing costs are higher than anticipated and the business model is failing. Apologize again. Then give a grace period so people are not caught off guard with short notice. Furthermore give existing customers some added value not make them pay the same as new customers. Give them expedited customer support or a premium feature for free. Something. Lastly thank the customers for their time and state you understand if they choose another provider. At least then I would feel the people running the business are partly human hopefully doing their best.
Not just shamed but also punished by law. This needs to be taken before a judge. They're violating the terms of their own agreement in the name of greed and trying to pass the blame on their own customers. What a gross business. I've never used them before and now know for certain that I never will.
You don't. Those users helped bootstrap the company; you deliver the service at the level you promised as long as you're able to.
If you didn't promise free updates/upgrades, you then can sell additional premium services only available to people who voluntarily upgrade to a package that pays more.
The very least that a company that wants to go back on the promise would have to do would be full refunds. It would still be wrong, but the fact that they aren't even giving those out (automatically on cancellation, without asking) shows the lack of good faith.
I don’t think that selling a ‘lifetime’ license is the same as offering lifetime support and bug fixes. Your license would be for a version of the software and I’d expect a year or two of support from that, just as the standard guarantee consumers have when buying physical goods.
I don’t think it’d be that controversial to release a new version of the app with a different pricing model while offering a fair upgrade path to existing users. Only this version would be available on the App Store.
They can choose not to upgrade and the old app will still work just fine. Keeping the servers up for that would be the cost of doing business.
This is more or less what 1Password have done. All their old versions are still usable, you still have the license for an old version because you bought it. Each upgrade is basically an entirely different release that you can subscribe to or pay for.
Cerberus have fucked up by pulling the rug from underneath everyone and revoking their licenses, making the software they bought unusable.
And as a word to the wise, maybe don’t think about making lifetime or ‘free forever’ promises. They’re totally unrealistic.
You received this message because your 1Password subscription has lapsed. While your account is frozen, you can still view all your items, copy your passwords, and even copy items to vaults outside your account. But you won’t be able to:
Add new items to vaults
Edit items
Invite people to your family or team
Fill items in your browser
It becomes a read-only list of your passwords, instead of providing ongoing service at a fixed version of the software (unlike JetBrains IDEs, where you actually keep fully operational version of the IDE at the latest version you qualified for).
I think they're referring to the switch from a one time payment to a subscription. Everyone who bought at the one-time price got to keep their desktop application forever. You're apparently asking for a web application to keep working after you stop paying, which I find different.
What other app developers did in similar situations (seen a couple of time with transitions from free to paid): create a new app in the same space but with the new (hopefully more sustainable) terms, stop providing new licenses to the old app, put the old app the back burner (basic maintenance only, no feature development), hope that the business transitions over.
That upholds the promise (you still get whatever you paid for at some point) better than the other legal alternative (shutting down the app entirely, which ends the "lifetime"). If you want to get rid of the dead weight, and it doesn't happen organically, periodically offer specials for customers of the old app to transition to the new one.
What you should never do: take something that is "lifetime" and make it expire. That only demonstrates that you're not trustworthy.
That's still skeezy, but in a suble way. A "lifetime subscription" is different from "no maintenance" license, as the subscription costs mote. Changing the terms after closing the deal by renaming the app ought to be illegal.
The only valid thing to do is to refund the purchase price. Either all of it, or at the very least the difference between price paid and how much is would have cost to buy the pay as you go license up til now, plus a consolation bonus.
Lifetime of the product. Given such constraints I would seriously consider just starting different projects and let that app die a slow, painful death by having the ecosystem around it move forward.
Yes, the app will be functional on Android 8 in 2039 - if you can still find a functional Android 8 device then (after the epoch roll-over).
Basic maintenance helps the app move forward to Android 30 (or whatever is current then), letting you enjoy precisely the features you've bought back in 2017, so to me that seems to be strictly better.
(I exaggerated version numbers and dates to take in the epoch roll-over issue as an outside-anybody's-responsibility issue with an ancient base OS: https://www.quora.com/What-will-happen-to-a-64-bit-Android-d..., but the same scenario also applies when talking about supporting whatever base OS of 2022 and the ways it will or will not be compatible to today's apps)
Honour your promises, or [hopefully] die under the weight of lost court cases... A bad promise made in good faith is still going to surely put you in breach of trading contract when you renege?
I think declaring bankruptcy is the only legal option in general, although refunding the price paid might be fine as well in some cases.
Of course you could also have made a promise with a provision for what happens in case you want to back out (typically with some sort of compensation if appropriate).
With honesty. But in this case the promise was not made in good faith, promising lifetime while expecting and planning couple of years max. Would qualify as fraud to me.
Expiring licenses, arbitrary limits, crippled functionality, troubles with moving software between computers, publishers going under... this, much more than money, is why I stick to free software as much as possible.
Expiring licenses, arbitrary limits, crippled functionality, troubles with moving software between computers, publishers going under... this, much more than money, is why I stick to free software as much as possible.
The problem extends beyond software. I had a home weather station from LaCrosse Technology that was supposed to provide internet-connected forecasts and alerts for a lifetime.
It turns out LaCrosse didn't mean my lifetime, or the lifetime of the device, but more like the lifetime of a carnival goldfish.
A license expires and I am at the sellers mercy whether I am allowed to get it extended. If it were libre I could instead find someone else to give my money to and keep using it.
I want to use my software for something else. Again, I can try offering the company money to allow me to, but if they say no I am out of luck. Instead I can pay whoever I like to implement the necessary changes for me.
Crippled functionality. Again, I can pay someone else to uncripple it and the original manufacturer has to compete with the uncrippled version.
Moving software. That is admittedly only about licensing and kinda unrelated, but similar to the first one.
It is nice that libre software often also is gratis but that is just a nice bonus.
Even if you have a perpetual license valid on any computer, it may still be impossible to move the license/software to different hardware, if you legally can't debug/reverse engineer it and pay someone to fix the incompatibility.
Maybe you mean open source? None of what you describe is limited to free software.
If software is free, someone still has to sacrifice to keep it up to date. If you're not paying money for it, publishers will get money in other ways like advertisements, or selling your data.
Most apps cost less than the price of a single meal.
People that see value in something but refuse to pay even the tiniest amounts will always be a cultural amazement to me.
"“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis. "
Well, as they are selling in the EU, you can at least get you money back (probably about (75/years you owned the app)*fee less but hey) if you bought it there.
And then report them to your local consumer protection bureau for illegal and/or deceptive practices depending on your country.
Lifetime licenses are the pyramid scheme of software sales; it’s not a sustainable model and generally they’re offered for the lifetime of the product, not the purchaser.
Of course that's sustainable, if your license doesn't require me to run some online infrastructure in order for it to continue to be useful.
In the case of the software in question on this thread, the software is useless without the online service.
It's very hard to price a lifetime, one-time-fee license that requires ongoing expenses to provide an online service, in such a way that providing the service in perpetuity is sustainable.
There is a situation I read about but can't properly search for some reason. An English monarch traveling through some town, centuries ago, was sufficiently impressed by something that happened in the town that he left behind an endowment to supply an altar with candles forever.
It’s doable. It’s just you need to know how to make it work. Also keep improving so afterwards people not on those licenses keep buying and paying for it.
Re lifetime licenses, if you offer it for a certain amount of time or until you reach a goal. it can work. At that point, hey! You have funding and you bootstrapped your product/company.
Then you switch to whatever licensing scheme you want.
The model assumes that people who are capable of building software are also capable of pricing it properly. Pricing is really complicated. It is even more complicated if your cost structure relies on other paid products.
Software's development costs are all up-front. Shrinkwrap sales are a one-time monetisation event. Marginal costs of production are nil, so price tends to nil under pressure (that's the producer's downside, if they're unable to create some defensive moat).
As new release dates near, the problem is that the old product has diminished value (or at least is generally perceived to), the new product isn't generating revenues but is generating costs, and the hint of a new release means that the old product has vastly reduced price pressure. The hardware case of this is known as being Osbourned, after Osbourne Computer's ill-timed next-gen product statements.
With subscription service, cashflow is consistent, and is time-averaged over the development/release cycle. From a producer's perspective, this is an upside. For the customer, it's a downside, as risk is transferred, and an inability to make a subscription payment means loss of access to the service.
My sense is that there ought to be a sensible split, where small customers can outright buy product, but large customers (generally, enterprise/government) are on a subscrption basis. The latter have far more consistent budgeting over time, and also comparatively greater negotiation leverage (so that they aren't entirely beholden to the vendor).
Shrinkwrap licensing is actually a very small case of software sales, and is virtually always secondary to subscription, lease, services (contract), advertising, or per-unit revenue models. That last is Microsoft's bread and butter, penultimate, Google, Facebook, and the AdTech-supported Web.
TL;DR: You buy the current release, but there's (possibly) no future.
The idea that the buy-once model is still working is an idea that would need to be justified with some evidence.
I’m having trouble thinking of a significant collection of medium to large-sized successful software companies that still operate that way.
Video Game companies are perhaps a decent example of that model sort of working, except that the industry has a history of constant studio dissolution and poor working conditions.
So, it’s not that I’m assuming you’re wrong, I just think your idea needs to be backed up with some more evidence. It’s easy to declare that everything about the floppy disks in a box software model works fine but I’m not sure reality supports the hypothesis.
Sure it’s sustainable. Of I can serve a user for $4 a year and sell them a lifetime license for $100 That’s a solid business so long as I don’t raise my costs or cut my prices.
yes 1password did that, then they released new version ... and plugin for safari that is available would work only with the new subscription version. no fixed payment version. fantasticCal I bought for 50$ after a year stopped working as new version was released and seems that facebook api on old version was broken - so yolo calendar app another 50$USD for new version. I asked them about broken api and they said it wont be fixed in the old version. There are other examples I can't remember.
1Password actually does still offer standalone licenses, but they don’t advertise them so it’s hard to find.
If you download the app from their website (not the Mac App Store), then there’s an option in the app to buy a standalone license.
I think this points to another factor (besides the cost of running servers) in why so many apps are moving to subscriptions instead of the old purchase-outright-and-pay-for-upgrades model: the iOS and Mac app stores have never supported that model. There’s no way to offer a discount to customers that are upgrading from a previous version.
There is a workaround if you use IAPs for the upgrade rather than pre-download purchase, although you have to release the new version as its own product, not as a simple version bump of the existing app. The newer version can check whether the older version is installed and offer different purchase options.
Apple introduced app bundles a few years ago, and those can now be used, with the same caveat of putting up the new version as its own app. In this case the App Store itself can do the check for the original version and change the price of the bundle.
It's certainly not ideal, but it is possible. Pythonista and GoodNotes are two that I know of that have used each of these workarounds.
This is pathetic behaviour by Cerberus. For a security product you really want a trustworthy company to deal with.
I could maybe accept it if they gave their users plenty of notice, a grovelling apology, and so on, but this seems like an exercise in how to most quickly alienate your customers.
Can anyone recommend a good alternative to Cerberus with similar features?
Cerberus also allows you to do things such as set off an alarm on the phone, take a photo using the camera, and a few other things. I don't think Google's solution does all that. In addition, a quick test looks like using Google's service triggers a notification on the device, which would cause anyone stealing the device to turn the phone off.
I think Find My Device is mainly a solution to misplaced phones, with limited use as an anti-theft tool.
There are so many ways to handle software/service lifecycles but Cerberus' apparent approach here is questionable from both a legal & business perspective.
Not only is this possibly fraudulent/deceptive behavior* but given that their particular service is predicated upon trust we think they should care more about how untrustworthy this makes them appear.
Generally, why would we knowingly engage a seemingly untrustworthy company for a trust-based service?
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* Although it is a "revocable license" the terms seem to only address revocation due to "good faith belief" that a user has violated the T&Cs. How to reconcile non-violation revocations of those who purchased a "lifetime" license?
I am one of these users. Aside from playing with the functionality a few times after I bought the app in 2013, I've never used it but always recommended it to friends and family. I'm willing to bet 90 percent of their users are like me and cost them absolutely nothing while giving them free advertising. Needless to say I won't be doing that anymore.
All these offers, "lifetime", "unlimited" are not sustainable. Everything has a limit. I have a surveillance camera, I benefit freely from the cloud system of the manufacturer to protect my house from burglars, by I know that some day, it will end, and I will be forced to buy a new camera. I won't complain about that.
Just because a company makes bad business decisions doesn't make it OK to screw over customers. Especially with something that costs them very little to operate.
Many "lifetime licenses" are a gamble - you risk the product going away if the company goes bankrupt, and you prepay a lot of money. Granted, here, it was relatively cheap, but that doesn't make it OK to revoke it.
Especially since this seems to be a pure money-grab ("we know you already paid, but how about paying a second time?"), not a "company can't afford the burden of legacy customers given a good deal".
I think it's obvious that lifetime subscriptions probably shouldn't exist if the app requires a server side component. Unless the company treats this like early investment and honours it.
What really annoys me is when a company converts an offline app to subscription, like Ulysses. That was super annoying. At $40/y it's a complete ripoff for just an offline note taking app.
It's also annoying when a company doesn't need a server-side component and adds it anyway (like 1Password - possibly to justify the higher price or subscription). I much prefer enpass which just uses your own Dropbox or Google Drive.
When money is paid for something, then the service needs to be rendered or the money returned. Everything else is fraud. If Cerberus doesn't like lifetime licenses, they need to at least return the money paid for those licenses. I suspect a court would agree.
They did this 2 or 3 years back for the free lifetime license users on Amazon. The feedback at the time was very similar to what I'm seeing here today.
I left the service in favor of the native Android solution from Google
This is not to take anything away from the level of pettiness from Cerberus in the way they're handling it but there’s a couple of ways that this happens with companies:
1. Severe miscalculation where the costs of lifetime users become significant. This speaks to a business problem, that you have dedicated users but only at a skewed low cost.
2. It becomes a political thing that new leaders can use to “make a statement”. This happens when a lifetime tier doesn’t really cost anything at the end of the day, but killing it sends internal messages about thriftiness or just general statements that it’s a new day.
3. Preceding a downsizing of a business that has fixed costs, like x number of human beings need to support y number of users. Chasing away users to reduce y so you can reduce x as well, and getting the lower paid users out is where you want to bleed userbase.
All of that said — these are all functions of poorly conceived lifetime plans. Lifetime plans where the rest of your model is based on monthly recurring revenue should be treated for what they are, which is marketing. Don’t run them for long periods of time, cap them at a reasonable number of users for the spend, etc. And then if you screw that up, whatever you do as a correction, don’t blame the users and be very upfront.
So, this raises a question I've been wondering about. It seems like lifetime licenses, i.e. one-time payments for a lifetime of access to upgrades, it seems like there's been a number of cases where this backfires, either for the company or the user.
I also dislike subscriptions, either paying for them or charging them, I'm a traditionalist, pay for the software and you get point upgrades for free.
But my question is, is anyone doing this traditional model with web services? Pay for access to a specific version of a web application, and you get that for a lifetime (maybe with some small maintenance fee for upkeep)? But if you want to upgrade to the v3 of the web application, that's a new fee?
Is anyone doing this? Is this workable? I might want to try it for my next project but am wary of pitfalls.
I guess games are doing this or at least something similar with the DLC packs. You buy the game once, keep paying for the new variants(?) and specials. And you get bug fixes for these for free.
If users still have the credit card used to pay for the service, I would see about issuing a charge back. Looks to be enough evidence of false advertisement, specifically the emails that free lifetime users received.
I highly doubt a bank will be happy with you trying to charge back a $3 charge made years ago. Even if that wasn't done through an intermediary like an app store that would screw you over for the chargeback.
Having dealt with chargebacks as a merchant and user, my experience is that credit card companies will either issue the money back immediately unless disputed by the merchant, and upon dispute it's up to the user to provide proof of why the chargeback is warranted. And it looks like proof is easily gotten with all the promises cited in the article.
As a user, issuing a chargeback was a last resort if merchant was giving me the run around. Haven't issued a chargeback on a purchase years old, but have done so on one from a travel/airline site about 3-6 months old.
Sure they could've communicated better/found better ways to raise money. Someone needs to host the servers and if they aren't making enough to support it then you (the consumer) lose the app's services. What is lifetime license worth then?
They've probably spend enough of their own money supporting it already that it came to this (Wish businesses were more transparent about it). Startups and small companies are hard things to support with hard (sometimes unsavory) decisions to make.
If a business took away a free service (referring to the free lifetime users) that they gave me a license for and said pay nominal amount. Go to court and spend tons of time and money litigating or just pay the money? Think I'll pay the money as I value my time. It is your choice. If there are other services to switch to then this is the time to re-evaluate choice.
IANAL, but what would you go to court for? Deceptive practice? This is an app, nothing important that caused me undue harm. Just find alternatives.
> If the company goes bankrupt so be it, no one forced them to give out lifetime licenses.
Seriously, you would rather an app you found useful to go bankrupt and forced to find alternatives than to pay to support it and not find alternatives? Sheesh.
Reframing a paid service (lifetime service, paid for up front) as a free service is a marvelously deceptive description. Please tell me how you justify making that description.
False advertising and breach of contract sound like the first reasonable steps. Yes, it would be more time than it is worth for a single user. This is exactly why class action lawsuits exist.
I did not justify anything. Can you point out to me where I justified these actions?
I expressed my preference to pay if I were in the same situation as it is not worth my time. If it is something that causes me harm and/or disproportionate burden then it is worth going to court.
You are the one who reframed a paid service as a free service. Rather than calling it an outright lie, I am curious as to what reasoning led you to believe that it is an accurate description.
Reframing when my one comment referred to free lifetime users due to the first few lines in the article.
> Four years after Cerberus made headlines when it invalidated free lifetime licenses, the device security app is back in the spotlight for the same questionable business practices.
I get it that you want to reframe my comment so you have something to bash at, but the fact is I referred to a portion of the article. Not only did I say I value my time, I made no value judgement on your beliefs or how you spend your time. If something is not worth my time (harm/disproportionate burden), then I will not pursue it and will look for alternatives. What is so unreasonable about that? That I don't want to be negative as you said here? Not interested.
Ah, I see. You were mistaking Cerberus's actions of four years ago for their actions today. Four years ago, they cancelled the free lifetime service. That is allowed, as there was no exchange of value to form a contract. Now, they cancelled the paid lifetime service. That is not allowed, as there was an exchange of value.
I did not mistake anything. I simply referred to an event that occurred and people were angry about four years ago. It is more than acceptable to comment on a specific portion of an article. I do not need to be angry, negative or show outrage about what they are doing today. I do not use the app and have no plans to.
I do believe that If I found myself in this situation I would be finding alternatives and paying for a better provider than to be angry. Legal methods are used only in the case of a substantial dispute as it is a time suck.
By the same argument I don't have to pay for a bar of chocolate. The investment in time and money to do something about it far outweighs the value of the chocolate, so you should just let me get away with it. It's also nothing important, and no undue amount of harm is caused.
Funny you mention that given shops have to deal with it and not every case is worth pursuing for time benefit. Amazon Go stores are an example of stores that will take the hit if it is not worth it.
Anyway, like I said I value my time and lots of others do too. I never made a value judgement on your beliefs or time.
I noticed the email about a week ago, and couldn't understand why my subscription was expiring. Didn't even remember it was a lifetime one, thought there was something wrong and they were kicking me out and not charging the annual fee.
I would look for alternatives, but since the fee is not unreasonable, I'll pay for it. That said, the way they conduct business is shameful.
Sometime after the 11/2018 policy revamp that removed a lot of capabilities around sms access, etc.
"To give users an option to have a thorough protection, the Play Store app displayed a message informing that the full-featured app could be installed as an update from our official website. Apparently even that is not allowed by Google, so they removed Anti-theft from the Play Store."
>> Quite frankly we did not think Cerberus would last that long!
Oh, I get it. When they said "lifetime license" they meant Cerberus' lifetime, not the user's lifetime. They just somehow survived longer than they thought they would.
Another example of how advertising has perverted language to the point of it having no almost meaning at all... Words used to actually mean something, but no more. some examples: Unlimited, Free, Lifetime, Guaranteed, best, trust, etc.etc.etc.etc.
Oh, and thanks to Trump, words like genius, fact and perfect, no longer have any substantive meaning either... What a bizarre world we now live in...
I’m more surprised that people are upset. I got cerberus maybe 8 years ago for a small sum of money (maybe $5) there is no way that’s sustainable. A service like this should be no less than $10 a year.
That said I do think the developers aren’t communicating well, which is leading to the upset customers. Seems like they should have said after some point they would be changing to yearly billing.
I didn't expect $11 to be sustainable for pinboard either but as I hoped idlewords used the initial revenue and/or attention to bootstrap other recurring incomes.
I get to keep my old account the way it was but if I decide to upgrade I have to pay which is reasonable since the service has been upgraded significantly.
I agree it's false advertising, however often in these cases it becomes the users problem because if it's not sustainable then the company might be forced to go out of business which is likely worse than paying more for a product you like and use.
Free software was once necessary to balance out the astronomical costs of enterprise software. But this is not the case anymore.
Free software is in this day and age not sustainable and using it it without contributing a dime is parasitic and detrimental to the health of the sw industry.
A lot of so called “free” software is alive and kicking strong because it is funded by mega corporations doing it to kill the smaller competition.
In a sense using VS Code or VS Codium is just as bad as relying on an obscure SAP module.
We should all support small and medium sized SMEs like the creators of Sublime Text.
>Free software is in this day and age not sustainable and using it it without contributing a dime is parasitic and detrimental to the health of the sw industry.
That is completely untrue. Merely using free software has no negative effect on it's continued development.
Even filing issues and bug reports are contributions if they are of high enough quality. And in fact, many projects allow you to buy support or new features for money.
>funded by mega corporations doing it to kill the smaller competition.
That's also untrue. Companies profit in a myriad of ways by providing their software as free software.
If anyone is parasitic, it's people selling their software. They're all using a lot of free libraries and tooling to actually produce working software.
While I do agree that people deserve to be paid for their work, blaming others producing a superior product for free is not a sane worldview.
You should donate to free software, tooling etc you use and pay their developers a decent wage like that.
And if you're a maintainer for a free software, start to charge corporations for support. That's the only way you can convince them to part with their money.
That only works for products with a B2B business model possible. That's not all products. And it's hard to build something with a "sane" business model when there's a lot of VC-funded products that are acting as loss leaders to suck the oxygen out of the room so they can develop a monopoly in a space.
People are not producing superior products for free out of their good will. And these are often not so superior either. It is a simple balancing game of a good enough tool vs a good enough vendor lock-in.
Donations do not work and developers should not be forced to beg.
FOSS is a broken model for all of us. At the end of the day you are feeding the behemoths one way or another.
In many cases, they are doing it out of good will. Emacs, gcc, countless languages and frameworks, most of the npm ecosystem, etc all have a substantial portion of “because it’s good for the community and now that it’s written, sharing it costs me little additional”.
Yeah, figuring out a good donation model where people can pay for the free software they use, and corporations can pay from their budget for a reason other than "just out of the goodness of our heart" is one of the biggest problems facing the Free Software movement today.
I personally love the Blender model, where the community are able sustain full time developers with donations while the software remains open. Building a community that want to invest is really important for sustainability of a project.
Why should we support small and medium businesses over larger corporations? Small and medium sized businesses are just as likely to treat their employees poorly and to screw over their customers as any large corporation.
But what I want to point out is that revoking something that was once promised to users, ridiculous explanations that the company didn't expect their product to last for so long, and finally deleting comments from their forum is a shitty move that Cerberus should be shamed for. As well as everyone who tries to do the same.