Lifetime accounts are to be taken with a grain of salt. They have an ongoing cost and the company may go out of business.
That’s why they won’t be doing this again. They are officially retiring the lifetime plan now. In the future, the company will be pivoting towards reoccurring revenue. Lifetime plans are ok when the company is new and expanding. In the long run, that strategy won’t cut it any more, so that’s why they won’t be doing this again.
And this transparency kinda gives me hope they can continue offering their service to make lifetime worthwhile.
But obviously we can’t know for sure.
Has a single thing in history that has ongoing cost actually fulfill a lifetime guarantee for say… 30 years or more?
These days 10 years before they rug pull is still a pretty good run.
The lifetime prices actually don’t seem that bad depending on your usecase (mine is solely redundant backups). Compared against Backblaze B2 for backup or a VPS service you’d come out ahead after a few years. I pay $50 for a 2TB VPS yearly, which I also use as a public IP reverse proxy/etc. Of course, “lifetime” means “for the life of the service” and all that, as well storage may not scale forever into the future, and companies usually tend to mess around with older lifetime deals after 5-10 years, but on paper it’s slightly tempting. Anyone have any tiebreakers?
Edit: I think I’d be kneecapped trying to find a cheap enough VPS to switch to that still fits my bandwidth needs. It would still be like minimum $20/year, in which case the price difference would be resolving at ~$30/year, which isn’t really fast enough to not consider this a risk or push.
The one-time payments sound interesting. I learned the internet in the 90’s, so I don’t “do” subscriptions. Hence I’m on SDF,
