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.
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.
> 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...
you’ve never made a mistake in your future predictions? youve never committed to something you couldnt deliver?
i understand the outrage but remember the people on the other side of that screen are just humans too. many things dont turn out the way the initial intention was (im not excusing this specific instance, im just hoping for less vitriol when i someday make some over promising mistake in future). let he who is without sin…
doesn't seem like much of a loss to lose that "business":
a user who hops from free service to free service, and is so opposed to spending money that they will badmouth any business that wants to actually charge for its service.
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.
Don’t disagree, but even more important I like that it’s being called out. It’s the word “forever” in “free forever” that really irks me - very likely marketing was lazy (and deceitful, really, when you think about it) and calls it “free forever” without the business having had real serious conversations (even at the board level) about using a word like that and what it means to the business strategy. I’m not saying people don’t make mistakes but I’m also betting companies just sling words like that out there without a second thought.
I feel like if its 2023 and you're still gullible enough to fall for "free forever" bait and switch offerings from cloud providers then we need to have a frank discussion on neofeudalist late stage capitalism where a mainstay of its many successes in the digital realm is to literally trick you into consuming a product and pretend like it never happened.
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]
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.
Reaper does the same thing: ridiculously inexpensive and insanely well built, one edition, updates every couple weeks, supports an SDK, I could go on.
I think it’s also freemium with a nag screen.
How this is sustainable is beyond me, but I’m thankful every day there are still some SW companies who do amazing things without sucking the life out of their customers at every turn.
FL Studio lives off plugins that aren't free. Still, it's great that the producer edition is free forever, but one might need to pay them from time to time when falling in love with some new sound ;-)
I too am a long time owner of of FLStudio. However, I have noticed that many new features added to FLStudio are not added to the base program, but rather sold as an add-on.
Perhaps the free lifetime updates plan is the reason for this.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> This is well written, but it doesn’t really explain how or why Zulip will maintain its free plan forever.
i don't see anywhere zulip has made that claim, merely that it is currently free. in fact, it explains that they're careful about what promises they make, so that they don't end up having to break them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost?
Well I bet how much those free accounts were costing is way less than $10 per month per user. The self hosting page suggests that you can have "up to 1,000 users" on a few dollar VPS. A little more if you need to upload tons and tons of images.
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.
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.
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".)
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.
[+] [-] pikdum|2 years ago|reply
If you're not willing to actually offer it forever, just call it a free plan instead of lying about it.
[+] [-] ziml77|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarym|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sizzle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matwood|2 years ago|reply
I'm sure they are also willing to give you back any money you have paid to date...
[+] [-] swyx|2 years ago|reply
i understand the outrage but remember the people on the other side of that screen are just humans too. many things dont turn out the way the initial intention was (im not excusing this specific instance, im just hoping for less vitriol when i someday make some over promising mistake in future). let he who is without sin…
[+] [-] 2h|2 years ago|reply
a user who hops from free service to free service, and is so opposed to spending money that they will badmouth any business that wants to actually charge for its service.
[+] [-] jxf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stanmancan|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] daniel_iversen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|2 years ago|reply
that you call it a 'mistake' speaks very poorly of you
[+] [-] matrix_overload|2 years ago|reply
1. See a competitor forced to drop free tier due to costs and VC landscape.
2. Get an avalanche of free users move to your platform.
3. Observe skyrocketing costs with meager impact on revenue.
4. Boot the free users. But hey, at least we did it with an apology. It changes everything, right?
[+] [-] nimbius|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taffronaut|2 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] mrtksn|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] berniedurfee|2 years ago|reply
I think it’s also freemium with a nag screen.
How this is sustainable is beyond me, but I’m thankful every day there are still some SW companies who do amazing things without sucking the life out of their customers at every turn.
https://www.reaper.fm/
[+] [-] bitL|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkimball|2 years ago|reply
Perhaps the free lifetime updates plan is the reason for this.
[+] [-] MikusR|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] asynchronyse|2 years ago|reply
Never using cloud again.
[+] [-] WolfRazu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chii|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] LoganDark|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] donatj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newscracker|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sigstoat|2 years ago|reply
i don't see anywhere zulip has made that claim, merely that it is currently free. in fact, it explains that they're careful about what promises they make, so that they don't end up having to break them.
[+] [-] alsobrsp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiedieconderoga|2 years ago|reply
Enough with this coy duplicity.
[+] [-] richbell|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristopolous|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dijit|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dalmo3|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonzzzies|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lrhegeba|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Dylan16807|2 years ago|reply
Well I bet how much those free accounts were costing is way less than $10 per month per user. The self hosting page suggests that you can have "up to 1,000 users" on a few dollar VPS. A little more if you need to upload tons and tons of images.
[+] [-] melvinmelih|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zztop44|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rvz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tough|2 years ago|reply
Random thought but > that age like milk.
Isn't aged milk cheese?
[+] [-] lanstein|2 years ago|reply
It’s how we stay sane.
[+] [-] fouc|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marvy|2 years ago|reply
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".)
[+] [-] glintik|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pentagrama|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|2 years ago|reply