14 ms·

When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

414 points by williamstein 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
differentView 3y ago
It's fraud.
- Garvi 3y ago
  Textbook fraud, yes. But it's a tool that also the big players with deep pockets would like to continue using. People look the other way, because the alternative is admitting, that there is a serious corrup.. lobbying problem. A realistic long term solution, so we can stop worrying, would be another rebranding. Instead of "legal fraud" we should start calling it "clever scheme" and instantly feel better about the situation.
asynchronyse 3y ago
Google pulled off a similar thing with their photos app. Offered "unlimited" storage in 2016, improved the AI leveraging all our data, discontinued in 2021. Never using cloud again.
- chii 3y ago
  When someone else controls your compute, you're not owning but renting, regardless of how or what they call it in the marketing. Unless legislation changes to make sure consumer rights are respected for cloud offerings, it won't change one bit. I would say buy your own drives, and store your own data on location. Use cloud as a backup rather than a primary use.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- WolfRazu 3y ago
  Wasn't it still "unlimited" for photos uploaded before the cut-off? That's quite reasonable for a free service vs. "paid lifetime".
  - asynchronyse 3y ago
    > quite reasonable Maybe. I'd use the word 'compensatory'. Using two apps to access half of my media each renders either one useless.
alanfranz 3y ago
My 2c: I hate that those changes are that SUDDEN. You can’t afford the free offering anymore? Fine. Give me 12 months to migrate. 4 months is basically extortion. I have the same compliant about google services: shutting them down in a few months is a shitty move. Give me time to find a replacement; especially if 0.5% of your users means millions of people.
langsoul-com 3y ago
Nothing will be free forever if the company foots the bill. Eventually, the number of free users, who don't transition aren't worth it. They can go nuclear and kill the free, but most often it's reducing the free tier until it's no longer usable.
- dmurray 3y ago
  How long do you think we have with Gmail?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ludston 3y ago
    Gmail already isn't free. Don't you see the advertising?
  - langsoul-com 3y ago
    Your data pays for the upkeep, same with every other free social media app. This is about servers, where the hosting bill is footed by the company, until its not.
nobrains 3y ago
Like Gmail's original "unlimited" storage promise.
- jmcgough 3y ago
  I thought it was originally 1GB?
  - scrollaway 3y ago
    It was indeed originally 1gb and only ever grew. There even used to be a “live counter” of the max storage ticking up. OP is probably thinking of google photos.
    - nobrains 3y ago
      OP here. When Gmail launched in beta, it advertised unlimited storage. Then changed to 1TB. Then kept increasing, until they stopped.
      - scrollaway 3y ago
        http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-launches-gmail.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-... 2004, announcement says 1GB. This stuff is easy to check, why don't you?
        nobrains 3y ago
        You are right. Apologies. I was remembering from memory and I guess lesson learnt that memory can be deceiving.
glintik 3y ago
I think, they need another nore skilled Product Manager. Offer "Free Forever" is a big mistake. Silently closing it - another big mistake. Instead of the first they could offer user count limited version. I.e. 10 users max, $10/month. The same as Atlassian did with Jira. Instead of the second, they could offer 50 or even 70% special discount from paid plan($10/user/month) to move free users to paid plan. Company gets money and users loyalty and no negative.
fouc 3y ago
Does anyone think there could be potential for some sort of escrowed trust fund structure around guaranteed long-term service hosting? As a third party service, like Stripe. Customers could have an option to pay a bit more for a "lifetime" long-term subscription plan. Part of the fee goes into the trust fund, which has guidelines on low-fee investments and designed to produce an income for more than 30 years, with something like a 3% withdrawal rate annually. Actual hosting costs are pretty marginal with the right setup and decreasing over the long-run, it's really the security & compatibility updates, and any app-killing bugs that could be tricky to handle cost-wise.
finnjohnsen2 3y ago
"forever" or "lifetime" to a running service is a red flag. It makes no sense unless you explicitly know how it fits their business model. Ex they take your data, have ads etc They made a mistake promising you such a deal, but I dare say you also made a mistake trusting it.
- zztop44 3y ago
  I think it’s clear that “lifetime” means the lifetime of the service. There are some services where the economics work out. And some where it doesn’t. But I agree that “free forever” is a much more aspirational statement than “lifetime access” and shouldn’t be trusted too much.
zztop44 3y ago
This is a bit off topic but I think it’s now clear that of the (many) open source Slack-alternative products Zulip emerged as the best of the bunch. They had a great differentiator with the focus on threading and they executed really well. Congratulations to the team. Overall, I think Discord and Teams won the space - but it’s a big market and I think Zulip will be around for a long time.
taffronaut 3y ago
For 25 years, Image Line have been shipping the FLStudio DAW as a one-off purchase with free lifetime updates, and since I've been receiving those updates for a significant chunk of those 25 years since I bought the Producer Edition, it seems pretty sustainable. In their words "Why? Because we believe you should get the program you paid for, bug-fixed and updated for as long as we develop FL Studio." [1] [1] https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio/lifetime-free-updates/ https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio/lifetime-free-updates/
- mrtksn 3y ago
  One time payment and forever free updates means the product dies when the growth stalls OR they create other services around it and sell those. It can work for some products and often those turn into freeware once they find a subscription or consumables for which the users are eager to pay for.
  - ohgodplsno 3y ago
    And when the product dies, you know what you still have? Your fully up to date product with the latest updates, until the very last day. My wallet isn't here to pay for your company's inability to find a market.
    - mrtksn 3y ago
      Buying a dollar for pennies always feels good, sure. However, using products of unsustainable businesses means you can't depend on it. For some products that's not a problem, for others it can become huge problem when you find yourself locked in maintaining old version of an OS or a companion software. The effect of not getting updates is very pronounced in professional or industrial software where to this day some people are forced to secure floppy disc supplies and deal with Windows XP. In college we had a lab of really old PCs which run a very old version of AutoCAD because the school purchased that version and it wouldn't run on modern machines, I was told. There was another lab in similar situation with Adobe products. After the subscription model raised to prominence, people get the latest version of the software and pay only as long as its useful for them. It's a win-win because the developer has the incentive to provide the best possible service in order to retain customers.
anonzzzies 3y ago
People don't look at the history of the company or the owners when they sign up; if I sign up for a 'one time pay, forever' plan, I need to to know this company, or, if it's new, the owners, have a history of delivering on promises in the past. If I sign up with a company that has delivered something for the past 15 years reliably and now add a forever plan, I can assume with some certainty it will continue. If it's startup of 1 month old with some owners without track record, I can assume they won't honour this deal when things go either really well or really badly. But I guess most people just buy stuff like this on a whim and then complain it doesn't work out.
- lrhegeba 3y ago
  while i agree with your conclusions regarding the probability if a "forever"-plan will be honoured, people are rightfully pissed. and it doesnt matter if people bought on a whim or after extensive research, the company advertised it as "forever" and when they now dont honour the deal they should be called out as fraudster/liars. cause thats what it is and i dont care if others do it too.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    Fully agree, but the research helps. I buy them sometimes if a service I have used for years offers one suddenly to get in some cash. I have not been betrayed; I do have some that are 15 years old. And they work. But yes, fully agree with you; name + shame.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I worked for a hardware company that serviced devices decades old. I remember walking through the back room of our Service Department, and seeing cameras on a shelf that were 60 years old. They were there for parts, if someone brought in an oldie. I'm sure the service wasn't free, but they were willing to do it. In our work, we were constantly being told to "play the long game," and think about how the software would age. They were still using an SDK that I wrote in 1994/5, 25 years later.
dkarras 3y ago
checked their website and their pricing page still says "free forever"
miragecraft 3y ago
I’ve always viewed “free forever” as “we will not sneakily start charging you for it”, not that the price tier itself will be available forever. Because nobody can guarantee the later even if it’s a paid tier, much less a no-cost loss leader.
DoItToMe81 3y ago
Ah, Mattermost. Their philosophy is to get people involved on terms they do not intend to keep, and then pull the rug from beneath them and force them to pay up. It's the only chat program I know where they've rugpulled the same basic features and put them behind premiums more than once.
jxf 3y ago
This blog post is from the "never let a competitor's mistake go unnoticed" school of thought.
- stanmancan 3y ago
  Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not. Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Changing your mind later puts the burden on them to figure out how to move forward. Even if I was a free user and I was considering a paid plan that type of dishonesty would make me move to a competitor. What else will they change their mind on? No thanks.
  - jxf 3y ago
    > Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not. Which part of what I wrote didn't you agree with?
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      obviously I'm not GP because, what is wrong with capitalizing on a competitor's mistake? Isn't that the point of competition?
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    > Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not. Agreed, except I can't find any examples of them calling out good business practices by their competitor, so I have to question whether it may be kind of slimy and disingenuous after all.
  - tough 3y ago
    They should at least grandfathered any users on the -free forever- plan
    - 3y ago
rvz 3y ago
All because they took VC money and now they are under pressure to start acting like a business and ‘make money’ instead of burning it for so-called ‘free forever’ deals that age like milk.
- wmf 3y ago
  Not everyone is lucky enough to liberate a fully-developed product from Dropbox and not have to pay them back.
- tough 3y ago
  I agree. Random thought but > that age like milk. Isn't aged milk cheese?
  - ZephyrBlu 3y ago
    Leave some milk out for week then have a nibble on that "cheese" and let me know how it tastes.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    No. Well, I mean yes, but no. The specific conditions and bacteria introduced are important. Sure, you can call wine ages grape juice if you wanted.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - MobiusHorizons 3y ago
    Cheese is typically aged but after it already became cheese by curdling (usually using renit) and undergoing some fermentation. In parts of the world where you can get raw milk (ie not the us) milk sours and becomes something like buttermilk. Some farmers cheeses are made from raw milk that has curdled in this way. In the us, milk is pasteurized completely enough that it rots instead of souring. I believe this phrase is American in origin, and is intended to be in contrast to the phrase “ages like fine wine”. Whatever the case milk does not become better milk with time.
lanstein 3y ago
For the love of God, just use Zulip :) It’s how we stay sane.
- kibwen 3y ago
  You should use Zulip not because it's free, but rather because it's excellent and kicks the pants off of Slack and its clones, who are more of an impediment to productivity than an aid. (Well, the desktop experience is excellent, but the phone app is lacking.)
  - usr1106 3y ago
    How is the phone app lacking? I am in the lucky situation to use zulip on the desktop at work. I often work long days, but my phone I keep 100% free of work stuff. So I have never seen the phone app, but I have heard unspecific complaints about the phone app before.
    - dijit 3y ago
      there’s a lot of odd behaviour, replying to a topic seems to not work so well or to be inconsistent. sometimes you cant easily select a topic to reply to; responding to a topic in the stream view requires that you open the topic by pressing the slim topic header (not the message itself, like the desktop client) You cant start a poll. deleting a message results in the message being edited to the string: “(deleted)” which is not what the desktop does. editing text seems fine unless its a word near the left of the text box, in which case the keyboard toggles between visible and hidden (moving the entire UI).
ChuckMcM 3y ago
I wonder if they ever compared the price of AWS hosting and just renting a rack at a colocation facility. One way of thinking about this is that "free" isn't "enterprise" and while you would love to have them convert, hosting free users on a rack with a 500MB Cogent IP transport contract can be had for < $2K/month. So $24K a year. Is it a "teir-1" data center? no. Does it have failure redundancy? no. Is there a risk of data loss in the event of a power failure? yes. But all of those things are what drive the costs up and are what make the "paid" plan, worth more than the "free" plan. Would it be good enough for people? Absolutely.
- skrowl 3y ago
  [dead]
- wmf 3y ago
  If your free plan is unreliable good luck converting users to paid though.
  - ChuckMcM 3y ago
    Ah but the rub is that it would not be unreliable. One of the things I discovered was that "reliable" in the eyes of non-engineers isn't the same thing. I have a NAS system for my important data because I know it is reliable, I know dozens of people who "have a copy on a flash stick" because they consider that reliable. You can build "good enough" in a rack that will serve a LOT of clients. One layer of ZFS (1U + 3U) for storage, Five 1U servers, one 2U 10G switch. In my experience that is 1 failure (that results in an outage) every 2 years at most. When I was at Google I (like everyone) had access to failure information about equipment in the "fleet." Motherboards do fail, but VERY rarely, disks are the worst offender but with double parity ZFS you have a week at a minimum to replace a failed drive. ALL the drive failures at Blekko announced themselves before they failed with SMART data. So in addition to the colo cost you've got an engineer spending part of their time watching the rack, fractional head count cost.
  - masfuerte 3y ago
    I have a tiny VPS that costs less than $2 per month. I run a chat server on it. In seven years it has had no failures and one hour of planned downtime. That's better than any of the major cloud services. Simple stuff is surprisingly reliable.
donatj 3y ago
Is there ground for legal action, particularly if you depended on this? It seems like a contract of sorts, and if any of their sales people ever assured anyone it was "free forever" I think that becomes a verbal contact.
- emacdona 3y ago
  IANAL, but: 'If only one party offers consideration, the agreement is a "bare promise" and is unenforceable.' [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration_in_English_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration_in_English_law
  - jxf 3y ago
    Consideration doesn't have to be money. Facebook doesn't charge you money and nevertheless has enforceable contracts.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      what contract terms can you enforce against Facebook?
      - jxf 3y ago
        For example, Facebook has been sued multiple times for breaking terms in which they promised not to provide data to third parties without your consent.
      - heffer 3y ago
        Depends on your jurisdiction. In Germany, for example, a court has recognized that Facebook enters in a contractual relationship with you when you register on the platform. As such, Facebook agrees to store and let you access your information on the platform in exchange for the permission to use that data for its own purposes. The highest court in Germany (BGH) confirmed this in a court case that Facebook lost where parents were denied full access to the Facebook account of their deceased daughter (they were only allowed to view the memorialized profile but not log in and read the chat messages, for example). The court found that the parents rightfully inherited the contractual relationship with Facebook in its entirety and as such had to be given access to the data that Facebook agreed to store and make accessible to its user. Full ruling available here (in German): LG Berlin https://openjur.de/u/870262.html https://openjur.de/u/870262.html, which was appealed by Facebook and then went to the BGH (highest court) which ruled in favour of the parents: https://openjur.de/u/2110135.html https://openjur.de/u/2110135.html Edit: Added links and distinctions between the different courts at the end.
melvinmelih 3y ago
We from Zulip recommend using Zulip
jldugger 3y ago
Federal Reserve strikes again!
kajaktum 3y ago
I am not sure why anyone is surprised or this should even be news. I don’t have a speck of business education and I can see this is no way sustainable. “Free forever” is not a sound business strategy (shock emoji). If it is free, like Youtube, Reddit, Zulip, than expects them to profit in some other way. If you can’t explain how a business profit you shouldn’t use it because: 1. Its not going to last. 2. They are doing something shady. Apply this to any companies, even your family’s.
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  This is good advice. I don't understand how venmo floats, and it has been a long while so...
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Venmo is owned by PayPal and they wanna get that business payments pie: https://venmo.com/business/profiles/ https://venmo.com/business/profiles/
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  > no way sustainable > If you can’t explain how a business profit They profit off the other tiers. This isn't a free product, it's a free tier. Whether that's sustainable depends on how much it costs to run. But it can definitely be a sustainable marketing expense.
taspeotis 3y ago
This is an ad for Zulip
- kristopolous 3y ago
  And a bad one. I stopped reading out of indifference before their 10 paragraph sales pitch
tiedieconderoga 3y ago
If I were a legislator, I would introduce a bill to ban footnotes in advertising. Everything that the company feels it needs to print, must be included in the main ad copy. Enough with this coy duplicity.
- dijit 3y ago
  there are laws about this (in the UK), and very often you can get settlements. Misleading advertising is a punishable offence and “terms and conditions” is usually not a strong enough defence if the terms are dense enough or buried enough.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  I agree with the sentiments but I don't know if that's feasible
  - tiedieconderoga 3y ago
    Why not, besides the practical impossibility of the current Congress passing such a law? IMHO, it would level the playing field for honest manufacturers and service providers. Sure, it would effectively outlaw many types of ads that we see today, but do you think any of the types of ads that rely on hidden fine print are really all that valuable to our economy or society?
    - kristopolous 3y ago
      Ok let's take contests. They're void where prohibited and a bunch of other rules apply. Should the odds of winning along with these caveats be stated in the copy? Let's take guarantees and warranties. There's certainly nuances there. Should all those also be disclosed in the main copy? Let's take the main thing here. What if they went out of business? Forever never actually means for perpetuity. All these are obvious? So is the rule to stare everything but the obvious? Who determines that? There's so many practical details that complicate things here In fact, much of these things have made their way into the law a long time ago. Maybe you just want to restrict the freedom of how they can display it?
pentagrama 3y ago
They should have called it "Free" instead of "Free forever".
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Or Free Forever but slowly hobble it one removed feature or imposed limit at a time.
duxup 3y ago
Maybe it works to have a free tier and yank the rug out from everyone, and maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost? The whole internet is like this, people often don't want to pay, they want it free, then the advertisers pay, we get pissy about advertising, and we become the product, and we flock to the next free thing after the free thing stops being free ... I wish things weren't all free, I wish we paid easily, and the relationship really be between us and the provider, directly with enough money to actually make them profitable. But it isn't that way for a lot of things, and I feel like we as users are part of the problem too.
- timeon 3y ago
  Connection to internet is already not free.
  - duxup 3y ago
    That really doesn't change the situation I described.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  > maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost? I understand your frustration, but in the end things cost what people are willing to pay. It would be hard to determine an intrinsic price for a cloud-hosted chat server.
- version_five 3y ago
  I agree with you, I'd rather pay for stuff. But paid products required appropriate information about what you're buying. A freemium model is one way that potential buyers can decide if a thing is valuable enough to pay for.
  - duxup 3y ago
    Free for 60 days? I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but a more direct relationship I would hope would establish a better pattern for everyone.
_HMCB_ 3y ago
“We fully expect to continue offering the Zulip Cloud Free plan indefinitely” doesn’t exactly garner confidence from an article written by a competitor. SMH.
- tasuki 3y ago
  From my point of view there's a world of difference between "we fully expect to continue offering free indefinitely" and "free forever". In the first case, they talk about their expectations, while the second case is a promise. Also "indefinitely" means that the end is unknown, not that it's forever.
newscracker 3y ago
This is well written, but it doesn’t really explain how or why Zulip will maintain its free plan forever. However, the existence of this post also makes Zulip committed deeper to not pull the rug on the free plan. Whenever that happens, I’d like to believe that there would be grandfathering for existing users on the free plan (unlike the rug pull that Google attempted with its free GSuite/Workplace offering and decided to not do it after a lot of backlash and bad press). One thing I dislike about these chat platforms is limited message history. The 10,000-messages or 90-day message search history limits are arbitrary as well as too short to be useful for any group that has more than a few members on a specific topic/area. For some (or many?) people, this will be a practical and annoying limitation that makes the platform useless for anything other than trivial chats where history doesn’t matter (except for “this is what you said two days ago”). Instead, they could consider offering very small (?) teams unlimited history. Platforms like Telegram (and Discord too, not sure?) are offering more and more features for free. Enterprise application integrations may be one area where Slack/Mattermost/RocketChat/Zulip may have an advantage for the time being.
- alsobrsp 3y ago
  I have been using a free plan for over two years. Zulip is awesome and, in my opinion, way better that slack. I use both on a daily basis.
  - usr1106 3y ago
    I agree. If I ever have to leave my current job (which could be soonish, startup and runway you know...) one of the things I'll miss most is the clean messaging experience provided by zulip. Everyone who likes the HN UX should be comfortable with zulip, even if it's quite a bit richer in details. We run our zulip on a smallish EC2 instance. It's probably less than a Euro/month/employee.
    - dijit 3y ago
      We pay zulip for their hosted version, which works out cheaper than slack and in any event I would like to support the development. I have had pushback from non-technical staff (and pushback from tech workers for a week, but now they seem to be very happy aside from UX bugs esp with the mobile app). If you're ever looking for work, we are hiring across the board, fully remote in Sweden or Germany. (due to tax!)
pikdum 3y ago
If a company gets rid of my free forever plan with them, there is a 0% chance that they're getting any money or positive word of mouth from me in the future. It's incredibly scummy behavior. If you're not willing to actually offer it forever, just call it a free plan instead of lying about it.
- sizzle 3y ago
  You can pry my MalwareBytes lifetime license from my cold dead hands
- matwood 3y ago
  > If a company gets rid of my free forever plan with them, there is a 0% chance that they're getting any money or positive word of mouth from me in the future. It's incredibly scummy behavior. I'm sure they are also willing to give you back any money you have paid to date...
  - kcartlidge 3y ago
    > I'm sure they are also willing to give you back any money you have paid to date... A "free plan" is one thing, and what you say is totally fair for that. A "free forever plan", though, contains a promise. And whilst we know it isn't literally true (companies die or pivot, takeovers happen, economies crash etc), there's an element of broken trust when "forever" is not only dropped but the communications around it are silent or misleading about the loss. I've no skin in the game (or axe to grind) but it feels like that might be the crux of the issue - it's a question of integrity when communicating.
- ziml77 3y ago
  Still a net gain for the company. Getting something from them for free means you are costing them money. And I would bet your word of mouth was also worth negative dollars to them since you're going to be telling people about the free tier.
  - Sebb767 3y ago
didgetmaster 3y ago
Their problem is they went with the 'forever' word instead of the much more common 'lifetime' word. That way they can tell you that even though you might have thought it was your lifetime they were talking about; in reality they were talking about the lifetime of something completely different.
- rzzzt 3y ago
  It was indeed my lifetime. Now I have to watch out for ninjas and pianos randomly falling out of the sky, otherwise everyone's "free for lifetime" offer will be converted into paid plans.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
marvy 3y ago
I feel like there's two sides to this. On one hand, I agree with Zulip: don't make promises you're not sure can keep. On the other, you also shouldn't believe promises if the person making them is obviously not in a position to guarantee. Example: suppose I offer you free email hosting "forever". Should you believe me? What if I go out of business? Well, in that case, I can at least ensure that your email address gets transferred to a different provider, so I'll still have kept my promise. So maybe this particular promise is believable. But that only works because email is more or less a standard so there are many providers. Suppose I offer something that no one else does. Can you trust my promise that it will be "free forever"? Clearly, if I go out of business, then no. Can I at least make a conditional promise that it will be free "as long as I'm in business"? But suppose I'm a month from bankruptcy, and my accountant tells me that getting rid of my free tier would save me. Surely, it's better for my free users to lose service rather than ALL my users losing service. So, unless you're sure I'd never be in that situation, you shouldn't believe me when I say "as long as I'm business this will be free". Okay, how about a vague promise like "this service will keep its free tier around unless the business is in a desperate situation of some kind"? That's a promise that I could indeed keep, if I decide it's important enough... unless... how sure are you that I'll remain in full control of what is currently "my" business? What if I take my company public? I might then be kicked out by the board. (It happened to Steve Jobs, right?) So either my "free forever" promise means I'm not allowed to go public, or at least I need to do some very careful legal acrobatics to ensure that the board can't go back on my promise, even if they kick me out. Still, if you find yourself needing to break a promise you made about "forever" a mere month after you made it, you should probably at least apologize instead of just hoping that no one remembers that you ever made such a promise. Chances are, they will indeed remember. If "it's the right thing to do" is not enough motivation, then do it for the brownie points, you'll get more of them this way. ("Who cares about brownie points?" you ask? Well, clearly, if they weren't worried about brownie points then they wouldn't be playing this weird game of "let's pretend we never said the forever".)
jackvalentine 3y ago
Oh hey, it’s like the mIRC rugpull.
LoganDark 3y ago
> Zulip’s support strategy is, as much as possible, to solve the reported problem > it’s not how most companies handle their support load This is so sad, Alexa play despacito. If "most companies" no longer actually solve issues through customer service, what is even happening to the world? I'm starting to feel like the purpose of customer service is actually to waste the customer's time with the impression of helpfulness until they no longer have any energy and give up pursuing other avenues. Presumably to prevent upset customers from leaving bad reviews, trying to contact anyone else at the company, or threatening legal action. It's just de-escalation and exhaustion.
jenadine 3y ago
What I would have done is removing the free plan for new subscription, but the existing free subscription should not be terminated.
reacharavindh 3y ago
It was amusing to read the end of the blog post with this. > We fully expect to continue offering the Zulip Cloud Free plan indefinitely, and are excited to empower effective collaboration for teams large and small. Until when? “Sorry, we are going to take away that “indefinitely” plan next month”? The “free forever”, and “truly unlimited” like statements should just be banned.
- adrianN 3y ago
  Why ban those statements if you can regulate them to truly mean what they mean? Have companies set up the appropriate legal structures and funds to ensure the service can continue beyond the lifetime of the company.

414 points by williamstein 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

differentView 3y ago

It's fraud.

Garvi 3y ago
Textbook fraud, yes. But it's a tool that also the big players with deep pockets would like to continue using. People look the other way, because the alternative is admitting, that there is a serious corrup.. lobbying problem. A realistic long term solution, so we can stop worrying, would be another rebranding. Instead of "legal fraud" we should start calling it "clever scheme" and instantly feel better about the situation.

asynchronyse 3y ago

Google pulled off a similar thing with their photos app. Offered "unlimited" storage in 2016, improved the AI leveraging all our data, discontinued in 2021. Never using cloud again.

chii 3y ago
When someone else controls your compute, you're not owning but renting, regardless of how or what they call it in the marketing. Unless legislation changes to make sure consumer rights are respected for cloud offerings, it won't change one bit. I would say buy your own drives, and store your own data on location. Use cloud as a backup rather than a primary use.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
WolfRazu 3y ago
Wasn't it still "unlimited" for photos uploaded before the cut-off? That's quite reasonable for a free service vs. "paid lifetime".
- asynchronyse 3y ago
  > quite reasonable Maybe. I'd use the word 'compensatory'. Using two apps to access half of my media each renders either one useless.

alanfranz 3y ago

My 2c: I hate that those changes are that SUDDEN. You can’t afford the free offering anymore? Fine. Give me 12 months to migrate. 4 months is basically extortion. I have the same compliant about google services: shutting them down in a few months is a shitty move. Give me time to find a replacement; especially if 0.5% of your users means millions of people.

langsoul-com 3y ago

Nothing will be free forever if the company foots the bill. Eventually, the number of free users, who don't transition aren't worth it. They can go nuclear and kill the free, but most often it's reducing the free tier until it's no longer usable.

dmurray 3y ago
How long do you think we have with Gmail?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ludston 3y ago
  Gmail already isn't free. Don't you see the advertising?
- langsoul-com 3y ago
  Your data pays for the upkeep, same with every other free social media app. This is about servers, where the hosting bill is footed by the company, until its not.

nobrains 3y ago

Like Gmail's original "unlimited" storage promise.

jmcgough 3y ago
I thought it was originally 1GB?
- scrollaway 3y ago
  It was indeed originally 1gb and only ever grew. There even used to be a “live counter” of the max storage ticking up. OP is probably thinking of google photos.
  - nobrains 3y ago
    OP here. When Gmail launched in beta, it advertised unlimited storage. Then changed to 1TB. Then kept increasing, until they stopped.
    - scrollaway 3y ago
      http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-launches-gmail.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-... 2004, announcement says 1GB. This stuff is easy to check, why don't you?
      - nobrains 3y ago
        You are right. Apologies. I was remembering from memory and I guess lesson learnt that memory can be deceiving.

glintik 3y ago

I think, they need another nore skilled Product Manager. Offer "Free Forever" is a big mistake. Silently closing it - another big mistake. Instead of the first they could offer user count limited version. I.e. 10 users max, $10/month. The same as Atlassian did with Jira. Instead of the second, they could offer 50 or even 70% special discount from paid plan($10/user/month) to move free users to paid plan. Company gets money and users loyalty and no negative.

fouc 3y ago

Does anyone think there could be potential for some sort of escrowed trust fund structure around guaranteed long-term service hosting? As a third party service, like Stripe. Customers could have an option to pay a bit more for a "lifetime" long-term subscription plan. Part of the fee goes into the trust fund, which has guidelines on low-fee investments and designed to produce an income for more than 30 years, with something like a 3% withdrawal rate annually. Actual hosting costs are pretty marginal with the right setup and decreasing over the long-run, it's really the security & compatibility updates, and any app-killing bugs that could be tricky to handle cost-wise.

finnjohnsen2 3y ago

"forever" or "lifetime" to a running service is a red flag. It makes no sense unless you explicitly know how it fits their business model. Ex they take your data, have ads etc They made a mistake promising you such a deal, but I dare say you also made a mistake trusting it.

zztop44 3y ago
I think it’s clear that “lifetime” means the lifetime of the service. There are some services where the economics work out. And some where it doesn’t. But I agree that “free forever” is a much more aspirational statement than “lifetime access” and shouldn’t be trusted too much.

zztop44 3y ago

This is a bit off topic but I think it’s now clear that of the (many) open source Slack-alternative products Zulip emerged as the best of the bunch. They had a great differentiator with the focus on threading and they executed really well. Congratulations to the team. Overall, I think Discord and Teams won the space - but it’s a big market and I think Zulip will be around for a long time.

taffronaut 3y ago

For 25 years, Image Line have been shipping the FLStudio DAW as a one-off purchase with free lifetime updates, and since I've been receiving those updates for a significant chunk of those 25 years since I bought the Producer Edition, it seems pretty sustainable. In their words "Why? Because we believe you should get the program you paid for, bug-fixed and updated for as long as we develop FL Studio." [1] [1] https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio/lifetime-free-updates/ https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio/lifetime-free-updates/

mrtksn 3y ago
One time payment and forever free updates means the product dies when the growth stalls OR they create other services around it and sell those. It can work for some products and often those turn into freeware once they find a subscription or consumables for which the users are eager to pay for.
- ohgodplsno 3y ago
  And when the product dies, you know what you still have? Your fully up to date product with the latest updates, until the very last day. My wallet isn't here to pay for your company's inability to find a market.
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    Buying a dollar for pennies always feels good, sure. However, using products of unsustainable businesses means you can't depend on it. For some products that's not a problem, for others it can become huge problem when you find yourself locked in maintaining old version of an OS or a companion software. The effect of not getting updates is very pronounced in professional or industrial software where to this day some people are forced to secure floppy disc supplies and deal with Windows XP. In college we had a lab of really old PCs which run a very old version of AutoCAD because the school purchased that version and it wouldn't run on modern machines, I was told. There was another lab in similar situation with Adobe products. After the subscription model raised to prominence, people get the latest version of the software and pay only as long as its useful for them. It's a win-win because the developer has the incentive to provide the best possible service in order to retain customers.

anonzzzies 3y ago

People don't look at the history of the company or the owners when they sign up; if I sign up for a 'one time pay, forever' plan, I need to to know this company, or, if it's new, the owners, have a history of delivering on promises in the past. If I sign up with a company that has delivered something for the past 15 years reliably and now add a forever plan, I can assume with some certainty it will continue. If it's startup of 1 month old with some owners without track record, I can assume they won't honour this deal when things go either really well or really badly. But I guess most people just buy stuff like this on a whim and then complain it doesn't work out.

lrhegeba 3y ago
while i agree with your conclusions regarding the probability if a "forever"-plan will be honoured, people are rightfully pissed. and it doesnt matter if people bought on a whim or after extensive research, the company advertised it as "forever" and when they now dont honour the deal they should be called out as fraudster/liars. cause thats what it is and i dont care if others do it too.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  Fully agree, but the research helps. I buy them sometimes if a service I have used for years offers one suddenly to get in some cash. I have not been betrayed; I do have some that are 15 years old. And they work. But yes, fully agree with you; name + shame.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I worked for a hardware company that serviced devices decades old. I remember walking through the back room of our Service Department, and seeing cameras on a shelf that were 60 years old. They were there for parts, if someone brought in an oldie. I'm sure the service wasn't free, but they were willing to do it. In our work, we were constantly being told to "play the long game," and think about how the software would age. They were still using an SDK that I wrote in 1994/5, 25 years later.

dkarras 3y ago

checked their website and their pricing page still says "free forever"

miragecraft 3y ago

I’ve always viewed “free forever” as “we will not sneakily start charging you for it”, not that the price tier itself will be available forever. Because nobody can guarantee the later even if it’s a paid tier, much less a no-cost loss leader.

DoItToMe81 3y ago

Ah, Mattermost. Their philosophy is to get people involved on terms they do not intend to keep, and then pull the rug from beneath them and force them to pay up. It's the only chat program I know where they've rugpulled the same basic features and put them behind premiums more than once.

jxf 3y ago

This blog post is from the "never let a competitor's mistake go unnoticed" school of thought.

stanmancan 3y ago
Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not. Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Changing your mind later puts the burden on them to figure out how to move forward. Even if I was a free user and I was considering a paid plan that type of dishonesty would make me move to a competitor. What else will they change their mind on? No thanks.
- jxf 3y ago
  > Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not. Which part of what I wrote didn't you agree with?
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    obviously I'm not GP because, what is wrong with capitalizing on a competitor's mistake? Isn't that the point of competition?
- karaterobot 3y ago
  > Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not. Agreed, except I can't find any examples of them calling out good business practices by their competitor, so I have to question whether it may be kind of slimy and disingenuous after all.
- tough 3y ago
  They should at least grandfathered any users on the -free forever- plan
  - 3y ago

rvz 3y ago

All because they took VC money and now they are under pressure to start acting like a business and ‘make money’ instead of burning it for so-called ‘free forever’ deals that age like milk.

wmf 3y ago
Not everyone is lucky enough to liberate a fully-developed product from Dropbox and not have to pay them back.
tough 3y ago
I agree. Random thought but > that age like milk. Isn't aged milk cheese?
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  Leave some milk out for week then have a nibble on that "cheese" and let me know how it tastes.
- TylerE 3y ago
  No. Well, I mean yes, but no. The specific conditions and bacteria introduced are important. Sure, you can call wine ages grape juice if you wanted.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- MobiusHorizons 3y ago
  Cheese is typically aged but after it already became cheese by curdling (usually using renit) and undergoing some fermentation. In parts of the world where you can get raw milk (ie not the us) milk sours and becomes something like buttermilk. Some farmers cheeses are made from raw milk that has curdled in this way. In the us, milk is pasteurized completely enough that it rots instead of souring. I believe this phrase is American in origin, and is intended to be in contrast to the phrase “ages like fine wine”. Whatever the case milk does not become better milk with time.

lanstein 3y ago

For the love of God, just use Zulip :) It’s how we stay sane.

kibwen 3y ago
You should use Zulip not because it's free, but rather because it's excellent and kicks the pants off of Slack and its clones, who are more of an impediment to productivity than an aid. (Well, the desktop experience is excellent, but the phone app is lacking.)
- usr1106 3y ago
  How is the phone app lacking? I am in the lucky situation to use zulip on the desktop at work. I often work long days, but my phone I keep 100% free of work stuff. So I have never seen the phone app, but I have heard unspecific complaints about the phone app before.
  - dijit 3y ago
    there’s a lot of odd behaviour, replying to a topic seems to not work so well or to be inconsistent. sometimes you cant easily select a topic to reply to; responding to a topic in the stream view requires that you open the topic by pressing the slim topic header (not the message itself, like the desktop client) You cant start a poll. deleting a message results in the message being edited to the string: “(deleted)” which is not what the desktop does. editing text seems fine unless its a word near the left of the text box, in which case the keyboard toggles between visible and hidden (moving the entire UI).

ChuckMcM 3y ago

I wonder if they ever compared the price of AWS hosting and just renting a rack at a colocation facility. One way of thinking about this is that "free" isn't "enterprise" and while you would love to have them convert, hosting free users on a rack with a 500MB Cogent IP transport contract can be had for < $2K/month. So $24K a year. Is it a "teir-1" data center? no. Does it have failure redundancy? no. Is there a risk of data loss in the event of a power failure? yes. But all of those things are what drive the costs up and are what make the "paid" plan, worth more than the "free" plan. Would it be good enough for people? Absolutely.

skrowl 3y ago
[dead]
wmf 3y ago
If your free plan is unreliable good luck converting users to paid though.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  Ah but the rub is that it would not be unreliable. One of the things I discovered was that "reliable" in the eyes of non-engineers isn't the same thing. I have a NAS system for my important data because I know it is reliable, I know dozens of people who "have a copy on a flash stick" because they consider that reliable. You can build "good enough" in a rack that will serve a LOT of clients. One layer of ZFS (1U + 3U) for storage, Five 1U servers, one 2U 10G switch. In my experience that is 1 failure (that results in an outage) every 2 years at most. When I was at Google I (like everyone) had access to failure information about equipment in the "fleet." Motherboards do fail, but VERY rarely, disks are the worst offender but with double parity ZFS you have a week at a minimum to replace a failed drive. ALL the drive failures at Blekko announced themselves before they failed with SMART data. So in addition to the colo cost you've got an engineer spending part of their time watching the rack, fractional head count cost.
- masfuerte 3y ago
  I have a tiny VPS that costs less than $2 per month. I run a chat server on it. In seven years it has had no failures and one hour of planned downtime. That's better than any of the major cloud services. Simple stuff is surprisingly reliable.

donatj 3y ago

Is there ground for legal action, particularly if you depended on this? It seems like a contract of sorts, and if any of their sales people ever assured anyone it was "free forever" I think that becomes a verbal contact.

emacdona 3y ago
IANAL, but: 'If only one party offers consideration, the agreement is a "bare promise" and is unenforceable.' [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration_in_English_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration_in_English_law
- jxf 3y ago
  Consideration doesn't have to be money. Facebook doesn't charge you money and nevertheless has enforceable contracts.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    what contract terms can you enforce against Facebook?
    - jxf 3y ago
      For example, Facebook has been sued multiple times for breaking terms in which they promised not to provide data to third parties without your consent.
    - heffer 3y ago
      Depends on your jurisdiction. In Germany, for example, a court has recognized that Facebook enters in a contractual relationship with you when you register on the platform. As such, Facebook agrees to store and let you access your information on the platform in exchange for the permission to use that data for its own purposes. The highest court in Germany (BGH) confirmed this in a court case that Facebook lost where parents were denied full access to the Facebook account of their deceased daughter (they were only allowed to view the memorialized profile but not log in and read the chat messages, for example). The court found that the parents rightfully inherited the contractual relationship with Facebook in its entirety and as such had to be given access to the data that Facebook agreed to store and make accessible to its user. Full ruling available here (in German): LG Berlin https://openjur.de/u/870262.html https://openjur.de/u/870262.html, which was appealed by Facebook and then went to the BGH (highest court) which ruled in favour of the parents: https://openjur.de/u/2110135.html https://openjur.de/u/2110135.html Edit: Added links and distinctions between the different courts at the end.

melvinmelih 3y ago

We from Zulip recommend using Zulip

jldugger 3y ago

Federal Reserve strikes again!

kajaktum 3y ago

I am not sure why anyone is surprised or this should even be news. I don’t have a speck of business education and I can see this is no way sustainable. “Free forever” is not a sound business strategy (shock emoji). If it is free, like Youtube, Reddit, Zulip, than expects them to profit in some other way. If you can’t explain how a business profit you shouldn’t use it because: 1. Its not going to last. 2. They are doing something shady. Apply this to any companies, even your family’s.

galangalalgol 3y ago
This is good advice. I don't understand how venmo floats, and it has been a long while so...
- bombcar 3y ago
  Venmo is owned by PayPal and they wanna get that business payments pie: https://venmo.com/business/profiles/ https://venmo.com/business/profiles/
Dylan16807 3y ago
> no way sustainable > If you can’t explain how a business profit They profit off the other tiers. This isn't a free product, it's a free tier. Whether that's sustainable depends on how much it costs to run. But it can definitely be a sustainable marketing expense.

taspeotis 3y ago

This is an ad for Zulip

kristopolous 3y ago
And a bad one. I stopped reading out of indifference before their 10 paragraph sales pitch

tiedieconderoga 3y ago

If I were a legislator, I would introduce a bill to ban footnotes in advertising. Everything that the company feels it needs to print, must be included in the main ad copy. Enough with this coy duplicity.

dijit 3y ago
there are laws about this (in the UK), and very often you can get settlements. Misleading advertising is a punishable offence and “terms and conditions” is usually not a strong enough defence if the terms are dense enough or buried enough.
kristopolous 3y ago
I agree with the sentiments but I don't know if that's feasible
- tiedieconderoga 3y ago
  Why not, besides the practical impossibility of the current Congress passing such a law? IMHO, it would level the playing field for honest manufacturers and service providers. Sure, it would effectively outlaw many types of ads that we see today, but do you think any of the types of ads that rely on hidden fine print are really all that valuable to our economy or society?
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    Ok let's take contests. They're void where prohibited and a bunch of other rules apply. Should the odds of winning along with these caveats be stated in the copy? Let's take guarantees and warranties. There's certainly nuances there. Should all those also be disclosed in the main copy? Let's take the main thing here. What if they went out of business? Forever never actually means for perpetuity. All these are obvious? So is the rule to stare everything but the obvious? Who determines that? There's so many practical details that complicate things here In fact, much of these things have made their way into the law a long time ago. Maybe you just want to restrict the freedom of how they can display it?

pentagrama 3y ago

They should have called it "Free" instead of "Free forever".

quickthrower2 3y ago
Or Free Forever but slowly hobble it one removed feature or imposed limit at a time.

duxup 3y ago

Maybe it works to have a free tier and yank the rug out from everyone, and maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost? The whole internet is like this, people often don't want to pay, they want it free, then the advertisers pay, we get pissy about advertising, and we become the product, and we flock to the next free thing after the free thing stops being free ... I wish things weren't all free, I wish we paid easily, and the relationship really be between us and the provider, directly with enough money to actually make them profitable. But it isn't that way for a lot of things, and I feel like we as users are part of the problem too.

timeon 3y ago
Connection to internet is already not free.
- duxup 3y ago
  That really doesn't change the situation I described.
karaterobot 3y ago
> maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost? I understand your frustration, but in the end things cost what people are willing to pay. It would be hard to determine an intrinsic price for a cloud-hosted chat server.
version_five 3y ago
I agree with you, I'd rather pay for stuff. But paid products required appropriate information about what you're buying. A freemium model is one way that potential buyers can decide if a thing is valuable enough to pay for.
- duxup 3y ago
  Free for 60 days? I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but a more direct relationship I would hope would establish a better pattern for everyone.

_HMCB_ 3y ago

“We fully expect to continue offering the Zulip Cloud Free plan indefinitely” doesn’t exactly garner confidence from an article written by a competitor. SMH.

tasuki 3y ago
From my point of view there's a world of difference between "we fully expect to continue offering free indefinitely" and "free forever". In the first case, they talk about their expectations, while the second case is a promise. Also "indefinitely" means that the end is unknown, not that it's forever.

newscracker 3y ago

This is well written, but it doesn’t really explain how or why Zulip will maintain its free plan forever. However, the existence of this post also makes Zulip committed deeper to not pull the rug on the free plan. Whenever that happens, I’d like to believe that there would be grandfathering for existing users on the free plan (unlike the rug pull that Google attempted with its free GSuite/Workplace offering and decided to not do it after a lot of backlash and bad press). One thing I dislike about these chat platforms is limited message history. The 10,000-messages or 90-day message search history limits are arbitrary as well as too short to be useful for any group that has more than a few members on a specific topic/area. For some (or many?) people, this will be a practical and annoying limitation that makes the platform useless for anything other than trivial chats where history doesn’t matter (except for “this is what you said two days ago”). Instead, they could consider offering very small (?) teams unlimited history. Platforms like Telegram (and Discord too, not sure?) are offering more and more features for free. Enterprise application integrations may be one area where Slack/Mattermost/RocketChat/Zulip may have an advantage for the time being.

alsobrsp 3y ago
I have been using a free plan for over two years. Zulip is awesome and, in my opinion, way better that slack. I use both on a daily basis.
- usr1106 3y ago
  I agree. If I ever have to leave my current job (which could be soonish, startup and runway you know...) one of the things I'll miss most is the clean messaging experience provided by zulip. Everyone who likes the HN UX should be comfortable with zulip, even if it's quite a bit richer in details. We run our zulip on a smallish EC2 instance. It's probably less than a Euro/month/employee.
  - dijit 3y ago
    We pay zulip for their hosted version, which works out cheaper than slack and in any event I would like to support the development. I have had pushback from non-technical staff (and pushback from tech workers for a week, but now they seem to be very happy aside from UX bugs esp with the mobile app). If you're ever looking for work, we are hiring across the board, fully remote in Sweden or Germany. (due to tax!)

pikdum 3y ago

If a company gets rid of my free forever plan with them, there is a 0% chance that they're getting any money or positive word of mouth from me in the future. It's incredibly scummy behavior. If you're not willing to actually offer it forever, just call it a free plan instead of lying about it.

sizzle 3y ago
You can pry my MalwareBytes lifetime license from my cold dead hands
matwood 3y ago
> If a company gets rid of my free forever plan with them, there is a 0% chance that they're getting any money or positive word of mouth from me in the future. It's incredibly scummy behavior. I'm sure they are also willing to give you back any money you have paid to date...
- kcartlidge 3y ago
  > I'm sure they are also willing to give you back any money you have paid to date... A "free plan" is one thing, and what you say is totally fair for that. A "free forever plan", though, contains a promise. And whilst we know it isn't literally true (companies die or pivot, takeovers happen, economies crash etc), there's an element of broken trust when "forever" is not only dropped but the communications around it are silent or misleading about the loss. I've no skin in the game (or axe to grind) but it feels like that might be the crux of the issue - it's a question of integrity when communicating.
ziml77 3y ago
Still a net gain for the company. Getting something from them for free means you are costing them money. And I would bet your word of mouth was also worth negative dollars to them since you're going to be telling people about the free tier.
- Sebb767 3y ago

didgetmaster 3y ago

Their problem is they went with the 'forever' word instead of the much more common 'lifetime' word. That way they can tell you that even though you might have thought it was your lifetime they were talking about; in reality they were talking about the lifetime of something completely different.

rzzzt 3y ago
It was indeed my lifetime. Now I have to watch out for ninjas and pianos randomly falling out of the sky, otherwise everyone's "free for lifetime" offer will be converted into paid plans.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

marvy 3y ago

I feel like there's two sides to this. On one hand, I agree with Zulip: don't make promises you're not sure can keep. On the other, you also shouldn't believe promises if the person making them is obviously not in a position to guarantee. Example: suppose I offer you free email hosting "forever". Should you believe me? What if I go out of business? Well, in that case, I can at least ensure that your email address gets transferred to a different provider, so I'll still have kept my promise. So maybe this particular promise is believable. But that only works because email is more or less a standard so there are many providers. Suppose I offer something that no one else does. Can you trust my promise that it will be "free forever"? Clearly, if I go out of business, then no. Can I at least make a conditional promise that it will be free "as long as I'm in business"? But suppose I'm a month from bankruptcy, and my accountant tells me that getting rid of my free tier would save me. Surely, it's better for my free users to lose service rather than ALL my users losing service. So, unless you're sure I'd never be in that situation, you shouldn't believe me when I say "as long as I'm business this will be free". Okay, how about a vague promise like "this service will keep its free tier around unless the business is in a desperate situation of some kind"? That's a promise that I could indeed keep, if I decide it's important enough... unless... how sure are you that I'll remain in full control of what is currently "my" business? What if I take my company public? I might then be kicked out by the board. (It happened to Steve Jobs, right?) So either my "free forever" promise means I'm not allowed to go public, or at least I need to do some very careful legal acrobatics to ensure that the board can't go back on my promise, even if they kick me out. Still, if you find yourself needing to break a promise you made about "forever" a mere month after you made it, you should probably at least apologize instead of just hoping that no one remembers that you ever made such a promise. Chances are, they will indeed remember. If "it's the right thing to do" is not enough motivation, then do it for the brownie points, you'll get more of them this way. ("Who cares about brownie points?" you ask? Well, clearly, if they weren't worried about brownie points then they wouldn't be playing this weird game of "let's pretend we never said the forever".)

jackvalentine 3y ago

Oh hey, it’s like the mIRC rugpull.

LoganDark 3y ago

> Zulip’s support strategy is, as much as possible, to solve the reported problem > it’s not how most companies handle their support load This is so sad, Alexa play despacito. If "most companies" no longer actually solve issues through customer service, what is even happening to the world? I'm starting to feel like the purpose of customer service is actually to waste the customer's time with the impression of helpfulness until they no longer have any energy and give up pursuing other avenues. Presumably to prevent upset customers from leaving bad reviews, trying to contact anyone else at the company, or threatening legal action. It's just de-escalation and exhaustion.

jenadine 3y ago

What I would have done is removing the free plan for new subscription, but the existing free subscription should not be terminated.

reacharavindh 3y ago

It was amusing to read the end of the blog post with this. > We fully expect to continue offering the Zulip Cloud Free plan indefinitely, and are excited to empower effective collaboration for teams large and small. Until when? “Sorry, we are going to take away that “indefinitely” plan next month”? The “free forever”, and “truly unlimited” like statements should just be banned.

adrianN 3y ago
Why ban those statements if you can regulate them to truly mean what they mean? Have companies set up the appropriate legal structures and funds to ensure the service can continue beyond the lifetime of the company.