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Moosend's “Free Forever” plan no longer free
- pupppet 5y agoI don't fault them for needing to make money, but this is a great lesson in how not to market a new product.
- fxtentacle 5y agoWhy? Apparently, it worked for them?
- gowld 5y agoBecause whatever their new offering is, customers are being warned right now that Moosend doesn't honor its contracts.
- pizza234 5y agoAnd so what? There's no evidence (and it's impossible to assess) that they're in a worse position compared to a hypothetical scenario where they would haves started from the beginning without free plans. Some people will distrust the platform, some other will reassess as stay if convenient, but can't really be assumed that all the users will fall in the first category.
- listenallyall 5y agoDid people on a free plan have a contract?
- pupppet 5y agoEh, in the short term I guess. Not exactly a great look.
- sokoloff 5y agoFor many people, this is their first introduction to Moosend. Imagine the difference of perception between “Moosend stops offering new Free Forever accounts, offers one year of continuation for existing accounts” and “Moosend cancels all Free Forever accounts and upgrades them to the highest tier Enterprise plan, with only 30-days notice”. One causes me to think “okay, that’s a standup company” and the other “well, don’t need to know anything more”.
- hprotagonist 5y agoforever until we change our minds.
- jandrese 5y agoIt is the classic "lifetime warranty", which ends up being defined as the lifetime of the product. The end of the lifetime is defined as "when it breaks".
- simonklitj 5y agoThis! My car has “lifetime transmission fluid” in it. Which translates to 150k miles. With change every 30k miles they’re known to last 300k+. It’s ridiculous.
- listenallyall 5y agoWell, they could re-engineer the car to fail at 150k miles. Would you prefer that?
- simonklitj 5y agoNo? I'd rather they told us to change it every 30k.
- gaoshan 5y agoI view all "free for life" promotions like this. Years ago I bought a free for life hosting plan from some provider. It lasted several years before they decided enough was enough. They moved the free tier people over to a server that would make an AWS micro instance look like the modern version of a Cray. I contacted them to complain about it and they essentially said, "What did you expect?" I had paid $400 for this plan when they were just getting started as a way of supporting them and helping them bootstrap their business. I learned my lesson, however. I had been using their main service for clients at the time and I moved everything away and never considered them again. Absolutely cost them more than the savings they thought they were gaining (probably cost them more than their savings in just the first month).
- CobrastanJorji 5y agoThis sounds bad, but remember that Moosend's newsletters were being printed on HP "Free Ink for Life" printers.
- skeeter2020 5y ago"free 30 day no obligation trial"... of their most expensive plan. Also know as "exactly what everyone else offers".
- gowld 5y agoCue class action lawsuit for the 20years x annual plan price.
- gruez 5y agoHas such a lawsuit ever been successful?
- elil17 5y agoSuch a lawsuit would probably be immediately thrown out. If someone promises you something in exchange for something else (even something intangible), you have a legal claim against them. If someone promises you something for free, you are not entitled to it. For a lawsuit like this to work, the plaintiffs would have to show that they paid something for the “free for life” service. Maybe they could argue that they paid with user data or something along those lines, but it’s a pretty tenuous argument and not one a judge is likely to go along with.
- HWR_14 5y ago> If someone promises you something for free, you are not entitled to it. Unless you rely what they promise you to the determent of other offers or a hundred other situations.
- bachmeier 5y ago> If someone promises you something in exchange for something else (even something intangible), you have a legal claim against them. If someone promises you something for free, you are not entitled to it. I'm not going to speculate on what a court would do, but what you've written here is 100% wrong. There are obviously benefits to having more people use your product. That's why they did it. When I was in college, there was a volunteer activity (I don't remember the specifics). If you wanted to volunteer, you had to sign an agreement to show up, and you had to explain what you were getting in return, like extra credit for a class. If you didn't do that, they'd turn you down. That seems awfully strange, so why did they have that requirement? Because no-shows led to a bunch of waste, and they'd had problems with no-shows in the past. The volunteer agreement established consideration for both parties. "Free forever" plans are not charity. There are massive benefits for both parties.
- mdoms 5y agoThis post was published on Jan 21 to announce a shutdown happening on Jan 20, that's pretty brutal.
- jtvjan 5y agoThen again, it says you get a free 30-day trial for the enterprise version, so it's more like a shutdown in a month.
- alangibson 5y agoIf you read really closely you can see the semantic game. They're not making the "Free Forever" account not-free, they're terminating free accounts. So it was "free forever", where "forever" is implicitly defined as "as long as free accounts exist." As a guy running a small time SaaS, I get needing to make money. Just don't do entirely misleading things like using the word "forever." They're now on record as being a company that doesn't keep its promises. Everyone should act accordingly.
- indigochill 5y ago> They're now on record as being a company that doesn't keep its promises. No company is capable of delivering on "forever" promises, so as soon as a company makes one, they should go "on record". Companies fold all the time, or more recently, get acquired by the imperial megacorps who may decide to change the terms. The only meaningful way a company can make something forever free is to provide a self-hosted FOSS option (like Gitlab) because then that artifact can outlive the company.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y agoI would personally argue that as long that is true, such promises should not be made. Maybe Pratchett was onto something when wrote this: "Mention has already been made of an attempt to inject a little honesty into reporting on the Disc, and how poets and bards were banned on pain of - well, pain - from going on about babbling brooks and rosy-fingered dawn and could only say for example, that a face had launched a thousand ships if they were able to produce certified dockyard accounts. "
- 3825 5y agoProbably worth repeating, Joyent > In 2004, TextDrive bootstrapped itself as a hosting company through crowd funding: customers were invited to invest money in exchange for free hosting for the lifetime of the company.[39] TextDrive and, later, Joyent repeated the money-raising procedure a number of times in order to avoid the venture capital market.[40][41][42] and began to flounder, suffering from an absence of leadership and plagued by reliability issues, with users leaving for other hosts.[42] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyent They took money from people and failed to uphold their end of the bargain.
- Wistar 5y agoFree but only for accounts with the username "ever."
- willcipriano 5y agoAnyone else get the vibe that they paid for this article. It's worded very weasely. "As they enter a new era of innovation and want everyone to enjoy the full suite of Moosend’s features, they will update their pricing plans." Who talks like that? Its either someone who isn't a native speaker (then hey, good job for learning another language) or marketing doublespeak.
- dewey 5y agoFrom the article: > FTC Disclosure: We may receive a payment in connection with purchases of products or services featured in this post.
- ape4 5y agoMarriage: until death do us part. (maybe)
- hammyhavoc 5y agoIs 2022 the year of the rugpull? First legacy G Suite accounts, now this. What next?
- floatingatoll 5y agoWe’re long overdue for a “pay for services you use” recoil now that our personal data can’t be easily sold to pay for them, and the pandemic forced a reckoning of revenue models.
- listenallyall 5y agoIf I were a Moosend Free Forever customer (I'm not, I use a different email service), I would write a strongly-worded letter and demand my money back!