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Look, I get where you're coming from, but LastPass's behavior is just not clever at all. Frankly, if I had to think of a better way to antagonize my users with

Look, I get where you're coming from, but LastPass's behavior is just not clever at all. Frankly, if I had to think of a better way to antagonize my users with 100% certainty, I couldn't have done a better job myself (short of disabling free accounts overnight). So when you're building a brand you have to ask, how much is the bad press and the millions of disappointed users worth to you? You have to understand, users you're losing this way are never coming back because you have nothing to offer them anymore. And they'll tell their friends, family, colleagues, bosses and just like that you lose a huge userbase. OTOH, if you treat your free users with respect, chances are they'll recommend you left and right and a percentage of these recommendations is bound to convert to paying customers. Of course if you're greedy and want to milk your customers for all they're worth and you don't really care about the long-term success of your product or your brand, then by all means, go for it. Another thought experiment: Imagine I gave you a generous gift for your birthday, like a new gaming laptop. You'd be using it for a few months, you'd finally throw out your old desktop PC and create your whole digital life around this laptop, install all your software, configure all your shortcuts etc. Then one morning I'd just show up and say, either you're paying my $$ every month from now until you die or I'll make it so that the left mouse button/half the RAM/the right screen half don't work anymore. You'd be just the tiniest bit pissed about that, wouldn't you? Sure, I'd claim that there was a file in C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\giftconditions-eula.txt that said I could do that anytime, too bad you didn't read it. But because while it looked like I was being generous, my goal was to trap you and then force you into a situation where it's ostensibly easier to just give me some money every month than to switch your whole life back to another system and build everything again from scratch. Additionally, even if you agreed to pay me, I'd now hide a few rootkits and trackers on the device, cause what are you gonna do? Sure, I might say, feel free to copy all your files to a USB stick and use them elsewhere (GDPR) but come on... Yeah okay it's not the same. But can we agree that LastPass's behavior is a great example of how to make people angry at you?

juancampa 6y ago
> OTOH, if you treat your free users with respect How did they disrespect their users? They even offer CSV export. Perhaps you can offer an alternative way doing it, I'm genuinely interested. It's expensive to develop, maintain, improve a service that works across devices, operating systems, and browsers. But more importantly, _someone_ has to pay for CPU, RAM and bandwidth. Would you rather that someone be yourself or (eventually) advertisers. Note that the listed trackers are not really trackers but analytics tools.
- imagine99 6y ago
  A number of alternatives were mentioned in this thread. User referrals; a better fleshed-out premium tier with actual added value without deteriorating the free tier; a longer transitioning period; a less ridiculous either/or (forcing users to decide between mobile & desktop, wut?); more pricing/tier differentiation; a genuine enterprise solution that finances the free tier and creates brand awareness and a good image; offering a self-hosted version at a higher (approx. 24x monthly pro payment per user) one-time price point for individuals, education, SMBs or a higher price for larger companies. This is just from the top of my head, and I'd argue that any one of them would've been better than this severely strange cause of action. There are endless ways how this could have been handled better without damaging the brand or user trust (if that ever played a significant role). Also, you seem to be offering a false choice here, if I may say so respectfully. The way I understand it, the choice is not between Pro and Free with ads. The choice is between Free with highly invasive data mining trackers and Pro with highly invasive data mining trackers. As for the trackers being analytical tools, well, a distinction without a (significant) difference in this case. I responded to that above. You could easily make a case that these trackers are worse than the addition of a random, not overly invasive ad network. At this point, if I could advise LastPass, I'd just totally backtrack, apologize deeply, commit to keeping the free tier for the foreseeable future, remove all but one of the trackers, commit to a total privacy-centric policy ("The password safe users will always be able to trust") and take that time to build a convincing value proposition for anyone who pays for Slack, Teams and WinRAR (i.e. professional users and enterprises), not a student or someone's grandma who will now have to pay up or be tracked and have only half the functionality it relied on for years... I'm frankly convinced that (not overnight but in the long-term), revenue will be much higher and more stable. LastPass could still be the first (or second, after uBlock Origin) browser plugin everyone installs on a new system. But next quarter might be a blood-bath compared to the projections their private equity friends did in expectation of finally getting to sell all that preciousss user data. ;-)

juancampa 6y ago

> OTOH, if you treat your free users with respect How did they disrespect their users? They even offer CSV export. Perhaps you can offer an alternative way doing it, I'm genuinely interested. It's expensive to develop, maintain, improve a service that works across devices, operating systems, and browsers. But more importantly, _someone_ has to pay for CPU, RAM and bandwidth. Would you rather that someone be yourself or (eventually) advertisers. Note that the listed trackers are not really trackers but analytics tools.

imagine99 6y ago
A number of alternatives were mentioned in this thread. User referrals; a better fleshed-out premium tier with actual added value without deteriorating the free tier; a longer transitioning period; a less ridiculous either/or (forcing users to decide between mobile & desktop, wut?); more pricing/tier differentiation; a genuine enterprise solution that finances the free tier and creates brand awareness and a good image; offering a self-hosted version at a higher (approx. 24x monthly pro payment per user) one-time price point for individuals, education, SMBs or a higher price for larger companies. This is just from the top of my head, and I'd argue that any one of them would've been better than this severely strange cause of action. There are endless ways how this could have been handled better without damaging the brand or user trust (if that ever played a significant role). Also, you seem to be offering a false choice here, if I may say so respectfully. The way I understand it, the choice is not between Pro and Free with ads. The choice is between Free with highly invasive data mining trackers and Pro with highly invasive data mining trackers. As for the trackers being analytical tools, well, a distinction without a (significant) difference in this case. I responded to that above. You could easily make a case that these trackers are worse than the addition of a random, not overly invasive ad network. At this point, if I could advise LastPass, I'd just totally backtrack, apologize deeply, commit to keeping the free tier for the foreseeable future, remove all but one of the trackers, commit to a total privacy-centric policy ("The password safe users will always be able to trust") and take that time to build a convincing value proposition for anyone who pays for Slack, Teams and WinRAR (i.e. professional users and enterprises), not a student or someone's grandma who will now have to pay up or be tracked and have only half the functionality it relied on for years... I'm frankly convinced that (not overnight but in the long-term), revenue will be much higher and more stable. LastPass could still be the first (or second, after uBlock Origin) browser plugin everyone installs on a new system. But next quarter might be a blood-bath compared to the projections their private equity friends did in expectation of finally getting to sell all that preciousss user data. ;-)