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Paid Cerberus 'lifetime' licenses are expiring

237 points by agluszak 7y ago

edude03 7y ago
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.
- eitland 7y ago
  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.
- msh 7y ago
  I would say it is a clear case of false advertising. If it's bad business to honor their own promises that's the company's own problem.
  - edude03 7y ago
    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.
- chrismmay 7y ago
  Anyone complains they can just say "Ok Boomer".
blfr 7y ago
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.
- zupa-hu 7y ago
  Much more than money? 80% of your reasons are about money. :) /All but the last one./
  - diffeomorphism 7y ago
    No. None of these have to do with money. 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.
    - jmiserez 7y ago
      >Moving software 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.
      - rovr138 7y ago
        Run a VM with the latest OS that can run the app. You then keep that machine offline or whitelist the required traffic. This is not isolated and there are ways of making it work.
  - deleted 7y ago
theaccordance 7y ago
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.
- michaelt 7y ago
  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.
  - theaccordance 7y ago
    Welcome to the exceptions, population you
  - unreal37 7y ago
    I think the app being talked about was $2.99 for the lifetime license. How does that work in your model?
- Grollicus 7y ago
  I get a piece of software, I get a license, you get some money, done. Why should that not be sustainable? That model is working for over 30 years now.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    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.
excerionsforte 7y ago
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.
- wirrbel 7y ago
  It's not a consumer's job to validate whether the license model of a company is sustainable for the company. IMHO courts should force the vendor to honor the contracts or as a compromise refund the money payed initially when people bought the license If the company goes bankrupt so be it, no one forced them to give out lifetime licenses.
  - excerionsforte 7y ago
    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.
    - maehwasu 7y ago
      > IANAL Yes, that is abundantly clear from your post.
      - excerionsforte 7y ago
consp 7y ago
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.
theredbox 7y ago
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.
- Asooka 7y ago
  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.
  - prox 7y ago
    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.
- y4mi 7y ago
  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.
  - theredbox 7y ago
    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.
agluszak 7y ago
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.
- simias 7y ago
  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.
  - stevekemp 7y ago
    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.
Causality1 7y ago
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.
dwheeler 7y ago
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.
boyadjian 7y ago
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.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
  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".
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
withdavidli 7y ago
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.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
  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.
  - withdavidli 7y ago
    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.
    - unreal37 7y ago
      It was 8 years ago.
mrleinad 7y ago
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.
hardlianotion 7y ago
Sounds like Cerberus does not deserve its customers.
12xo 7y ago
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...
techas 7y ago
Airmail
jjuhl 7y ago
Despicable. No other word for it.
Forge36 7y ago
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
chimprich 7y ago
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?
- chance_state 7y ago
  Are there features specific to Cerberus that you're looking for in another product? I switched to the standard Google Find My Device and I've heard the Apple one is good too.
  - chimprich 7y ago
    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.
dbrowne 7y ago
Things go badly when children design
Frondo 7y ago
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.
- ayushgp 7y ago
  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.
awinder 7y ago
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.
awill 7y ago
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.
techlaw 7y ago
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? --- * 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?
fencepost 7y ago
I wonder how much of this is aftermath of them getting thrown out of the Google Play app store in 2018.
- procinct 7y ago
  I missed that. Why were they kicked off the play store?
  - fencepost 7y ago
    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."
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> 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. /s

237 points by agluszak 7y ago

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.

eitland 7y ago
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.
msh 7y ago
I would say it is a clear case of false advertising. If it's bad business to honor their own promises that's the company's own problem.
- edude03 7y ago
  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.
chrismmay 7y ago
Anyone complains they can just say "Ok Boomer".

blfr 7y ago

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.

zupa-hu 7y ago
Much more than money? 80% of your reasons are about money. :) /All but the last one./
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  No. None of these have to do with money. 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.
  - jmiserez 7y ago
    >Moving software 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.
    - rovr138 7y ago
      Run a VM with the latest OS that can run the app. You then keep that machine offline or whitelist the required traffic. This is not isolated and there are ways of making it work.
- deleted 7y ago

theaccordance 7y ago

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.

michaelt 7y ago
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.
- theaccordance 7y ago
  Welcome to the exceptions, population you
- unreal37 7y ago
  I think the app being talked about was $2.99 for the lifetime license. How does that work in your model?
Grollicus 7y ago
I get a piece of software, I get a license, you get some money, done. Why should that not be sustainable? That model is working for over 30 years now.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  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.

excerionsforte 7y ago

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.

wirrbel 7y ago
It's not a consumer's job to validate whether the license model of a company is sustainable for the company. IMHO courts should force the vendor to honor the contracts or as a compromise refund the money payed initially when people bought the license If the company goes bankrupt so be it, no one forced them to give out lifetime licenses.
- excerionsforte 7y ago
  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.
  - maehwasu 7y ago
    > IANAL Yes, that is abundantly clear from your post.
    - excerionsforte 7y ago

consp 7y ago

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.

theredbox 7y ago

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.

Asooka 7y ago
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.
- prox 7y ago
  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.
y4mi 7y ago
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.
- theredbox 7y ago
  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.

agluszak 7y ago

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.

simias 7y ago
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.
- stevekemp 7y ago
  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.

Causality1 7y ago

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.

dwheeler 7y ago

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.

boyadjian 7y ago

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.

tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
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".

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

withdavidli 7y ago

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.

tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
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.
- withdavidli 7y ago
  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.
  - unreal37 7y ago
    It was 8 years ago.

mrleinad 7y ago

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.

hardlianotion 7y ago

Sounds like Cerberus does not deserve its customers.

12xo 7y ago

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...

techas 7y ago

Airmail

jjuhl 7y ago

Despicable. No other word for it.

Forge36 7y ago

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

chimprich 7y ago

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?

chance_state 7y ago
Are there features specific to Cerberus that you're looking for in another product? I switched to the standard Google Find My Device and I've heard the Apple one is good too.
- chimprich 7y ago
  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.

dbrowne 7y ago

Things go badly when children design

Frondo 7y ago

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.

ayushgp 7y ago
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.

awinder 7y ago

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.

awill 7y ago

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.

techlaw 7y ago

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? --- * 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?

fencepost 7y ago

I wonder how much of this is aftermath of them getting thrown out of the Google Play app store in 2018.

procinct 7y ago
I missed that. Why were they kicked off the play store?
- fencepost 7y ago
  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."

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> 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. /s