The reason this is more of a scam is that many people are glad to initially pay more in return for a lifetime price lock.
Many of us stuck it out with T-Mobile plans despite better options at the time because we're okay paying more now in return for a guarantee of not paying more later.
If T-Mobile is not honoring this once it no longer benefits them, a minimum penalty should be the price difference between T-Mobile and the cheapest similar option over the lifetime of the plan.
If I paid $50/month, and there was a $30/month option through Mint, MetroPCS, etc. for four years with the same data / talk limit, I should get back a minimum of 48 months * $20 ≈ $1000 (increased by a bit, assuming money was held in an index fund in the meantime).
Part of the reason this matters is many companies use similar lifetime tactics to get started. Nebula has $300 lifetime plans, which provided much of the early capital they needed. If this doesn't work anymore, it pisses in the pool for everyone wanting to do something similar.
It's perfectly fine to have early customers fund you with (eventually money-losing) lifetime plans, to buy marketshare this way, etc. There are a lot of business models which go away if this can't be relied on.
I's say that they should refund to you the entirety of your expected payments over the course of your expected lifetime. That would be their recourse towards you if you were to breach a contract with them, no? If you sign a $50/month contract for 36 months, and back out after 10 months, will they not come after you for $50 * 26 = $1300?
A "lifetime warranty" often refers to the "lifetime" of the product, not your lifetime or the expected lifetime of any person.
In that sense, T-Mobile has played this pretty straight. Customers got a price lock for the lifetime of the offer.
Just on a quick read, it looks like a "lifetime warranty" must actually define a length of time though. Which for a product you can, at least claim to, stress test or base on the weakest component.
Fastmail is a pretty well-regarded email service here. When they started out, there was a $50 "lifetime" account offer, which I took. They continued to honor this, even after they stopped offering it to new customers. As far as I know they still do, but at some point, I wanted more storage or some other feature, but I'd have to give up that "lifetime" plan to make any changes, so now I'm on a yearly paid plan. I grumbled a bit but they technically kept their word.
Google is intentionally screwing around with customers who signed up for an email account with their own domain. This gradually evolved into GSuite/free, Google Workspace, and Google has, at times threatened to wipe out accounts unless people paid, broken services, quite often very intentionally, etc.
Simply harassing people into paying should not be legal. There's a threshold somewhere, but OP should be able to e.g. pay extra on top of the free plan for more storage without giving up the baseline free plan.
It's also bad business. Google lost millions of dollars of business that way, on me, personally. I've had enough bad experiences with Google that I always advise people against doing business with Google. If Google had killed GSuite/free and wiped out my data, it'd be very visible (blog posts and the like), but where we are, it's discreet. If things like my GSuite account continued working, I'd be promoting Google like I used to when it was a quirky don't-be-evil company.
Right now, the things which bug me most: They need to fix Google Voice and enable paying for Google One on individual accounts.
Oh, and on the topic of Google Voice, my landline is about to break as Google just broke Obihai support....
There are a lot of economic texts which talk about how being able to have social capital, defined as for example being able to rely on promises, helps grow economies. Landes is a good example.
That reminds me of Flickr, which took my monthly fee with the promise of lifetime storage for uploaded photos, even if I stopped paying. Of course, they broke that promise. I don’t use them anymore, but some of my friends still do, despite the betrayal of trust.
The backstory is that the company was sold, but I don’t think that’s an excuse. If a buyer is allowed to purchase the business and keep the name and customers, they should take on the previous obligations. Otherwise, they should call it something else or make customers re-register.
Google Photos made a similar promise. They said "as long as you let us optimize your photos, the service will be free and unlimited". I started syncing my photos and I think 12 months later they announced the end of the policy.
I never paid so I'm not really that surprised but it was a quick about-face.
Was it a particularly fast (or even complete) about-face?
They offered it for over 6 years, beginning in May of 2015[0] and ending in June of 2021, with previously-uploaded photos remaining free still today, and they gave ~7 months of warning before changing things[1].
The bitterest irony about photos or similar is it's quite unlikely they really deleted (or will delete) the photos. I mean. What an amazing walled garden data set for image models. Literally the fuel for Meta or twitter's AI. So here they are sitting on your data, taking advantage, training models, etc.. oh but you want to access the data? Oh no, you didn't pay every month, can't help you.
However it does make me wonder if california's consumer privacy act would cover the right to retrieve photographic data such as this.
OneDrive also promised unlimited storage space for files, and it just lasted a few years.
Of course, most “unlimited” things are impractical from a business point of view. But I think the burden of dealing with this should fall on the companies making unrealistic promises rather than on the customers.
Sorry, they promised to store your photos even if you stopped paying? Was the idea that you couldn't upload new, but you'd still have access to old, or did you have to pay a "get them out of cold storage" fee? Either way, that's a bizarre business model.
They promised to keep the files hosted forever with live URLs so people could see them. I agree; it is a bizarre business model. I recall they had a limit on how much you could upload each month, so I guess they calculated how monthly fees would cover the lifetime storage.
It feels like a breach of contract. Of course, there is no (formal) contract between the corporation and the individual user, beyond the ToS which generally favors the corp not the user.
If I have 100M users paying $10/mo on an estimated 3 year term, I have essentially $30B revenue spread over 100M not-quite-contracts and can largely ignore any simgle one of them. But over in B2B, if I sold a $30B contract to a customer, you can be very sure the lawyering would be top notch and airtight. This is why regulators like the FTC and concepts like class action are so useful..and so disliked by corporations. I already note the vitriol directed at Lina Khan at the FTC for example.
Lifetime X is a great promise to make when you're trying to grow, but flickr can't provide free storage indefinitely, and at some point, inflation will catch up with T-Mobile's locked-in price.
I'm fine with regulators punishing companies for misleading advertising or not fulfilling their obligations, buy as savvy consumers, we have to also realize forever deals are too good to be true.
This reminds me of when I went in to a Patagonia store to repair a jacket with a “lifetime” warranty. Turns out they define lifetime as the “useful” lifetime of the product, which is a couple years. They refused to help and instead tried to sell me a new jacket.
I forget who owns Black Diamond, but they're kind of similar.
They haven't fully replaced the product, but what is cool is that they have a repair shop that has been doing free repairs for me. I've sent a very lightweight, very heavily used puffy jacket in twice for repairs at no charge.
Realistically I know that jacket isn't going to last forever, but I respect they are at least trying to help me extract as much life out of it as I can from a sustainability perspective.
It's using less material and less landfill, but I wonder if it really is more sustainable in the grand scheme of things, at the scale of clothing and similarly sized items. The additional round trip shipping and workshop operations (HVAC, lighting, commuting, etc.) could potentially exceed the footprint of just sending you a replacement right off the production line. Obviously there's a crossover point above which this couldn't possibly be (cars, etc.) but it's probably a very blurry line, and I wouldn't be surprised if some companies knowingly take the worse but ostensibly sustainable option, i.e. greenwashing, for the resulting brand loyalty and word of mouth advertising.
It absolutely is, but [using it for production of new items and using it for a repair shop] might take more resources than [just having the former and supplying some replacements]. What I'm saying is that we can't just compare consumption/waste of materials (which is obviously worse when doing replacement instead of repair) because there are also "overhead" resources required in order to offer repairs. Theoretically, in cases where replacements are better for the bottom line than repairs, it's due to using fewer resources, and the open question is how "green or dirty" those resources are.
If replacement is cheaper only because of geographic differences in wages, then we ought to repair. But if replacement is cheaper because of streamlining the use of nonrenewable electricity and so forth, then we ought to replace.
My Tomtom GPS is like this. I have an older model. "Lifetime maps". For many years, plug it in, new map, download done.
Eventually I try to update it and it says "oh no, do you want to buy a map!?". I mean. What? Doesn't even cost anything to the company to keep on giving me free maps - well I guess it's lost revenue if that they could earn by dishonoring the agreement, which is what they did. Clearly meant to extract more money from me in map purchase or to buy another "lifetime" map.
I have another TomTom on my other vehicle (despite the shitty practices, their kit doesn't randomly crash like Garmin in my experience) which about every 2 days nags me about an update. So here I am, newer model is way too aggressive with updates all the time, old "lifetime map" model is a disaster.
What it is here, is there needs to be legislation that if a company uses "lifetime" or equivalent word in marketing, they are on the hook for life to honor that, with some prescribed action to make customers whole if they should want to drop it.
Now a good guy legend in this field, craftsman tools, for many decades in america people would buy craftsman from their sears knowing they could always go back easily and get a replacement. Sears in the day was like if Wal mart and amazon was the same company. An institution.
Darn tough socks still honor their lifetime warranty no matter how long passes, though obviously no socks can last forever. Generally reading online you find people mentioning you should be reasonable about it.
I don't get it. Shouldn't it be the seller's obligation to give a reasonable lifetime estimate? Like, give me a five year warranty, if you want to advertise your socks last for five years of regular use. Don't pretend it's unlimited when it isn't.
>Shouldn't it be the seller's obligation to give a reasonable lifetime estimate?
Not sure how you define this or maintain it. These socks are guaranteed for 100 wears? Can't count wears. These socks last a year. Is that daily wear? One of 10 pairs? Only air dried? Was the user running daily marathons?
buncha people caught wind and purchase the product used/torn for pennies on the dollar, and send it in, in order to take advantage of the offer (and the retailer).
Statement still stands. The company can't afford lifetime because of this possibility. They should change the terms. They could say single owner lifetime or something like that.
Tilley hats as well. It was probably twenty years on, and both of ours fell apart enough to call about their lifetime (“put it in your will!”) warranty. Other than arguing that Tilley never made that model of hat, they sent us an equivalent without fuss.
By that standard we would have "lifetime" warranty on everything sold in The Nederlands, since by law we require warranty as long as you can reasonably expect a product to last.
I've taken multiple 10 year old T-Shirts with holes through 10% of them in to the Patagonia store and they've let me walk out with new product off the rack.
I had a defective ATX psu cable and MSI support sent me a whole cables kit overnight. And recently a bought a Corsair case, the iCue controller had 2 defective ports and Corsair also sent me a replacement overnight.
My only "trick" with support is telling them upfront that I will leave a 5 stars review on amazon uppon successful resolution of the problem.
Not anymore. I had a pair of boots that one of the soles fell off of one day. They were about 20 years old but still in good shape except for the glue failure. I called up LL Bean and they said they had no record of the purchase (I didn’t have a receipt but I bought them directly from them). After I insisted I had bought from them they changed their tune to saying 20 years is long enough and I should know that glue on the soles of shoes fails after a while. I just wanted them to repair the boots but they refused, so I won’t be buying anything from them anymore.
Here was their old guarantee: "Our products are guaranteed to give 100% satisfaction in every way. Return anything purchased from us at any time if it proves otherwise. We do not want you to have anything from L.L. Bean that is not completely satisfactory."
If they had just worn out, that's fine, but they weren't at all. I only use them maybe 5-10 times per year, so the sole still had tons of life in it. The problem is that they didn't sew the sole onto the boot upper and the glue they used just lets go after a while.
I don't think that the soles should just fall off your boots one day while you're hiking, so no, I was not completely satisfied and I would like them to glue the soles back on for me.
But also don't be a complete rube as a customer. Caveat Emptor. If a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There is an escape clause somewhere in the fine print, you'll find it if you read it.
No, I don't think contracts are BS, but I also have lived long enough to know that any time words like "free" and "lifetime" or "always" or "never" are used in a marketing campaign, there's always a catch.
Buying something like this as a 30y old? Yeah, probably garbage.
But if I read that correctly that they specifically marketed that to retired people or close to retiring... it kinda sounds different. 55 to 75 (or whatever the average lifespan was when this was up), you might want to think they thought this through. Lifelong rental agreements after selling your property are not uncommon in some countries, and you should know that you're gambling.
Maybe it's not the exact same thing, but I got suckered into a similar thing for a "lifetime" NordVPN subscription for $120 or something, only to get re-billed 2 years later. I like the service so I kept it, but it really rankled me. Seems like you shouldn't be able to do things like this so easily - companies, especially telecoms, have gone full "fuck you" mode the last 10 years to their customers and this is a prime example.
There are VPNs out there with better business practices. You'll find these are ones that don't blow disproportionate amounts of money on advertising strategies like "carpet bomb you with influencer endorsements"
I have my own VPN I setup for anything serious. I like the interface and convenience of this one better than anything else, but yea, I agree. Their claim also that they don't keep logs or give any user info away I know is disputed and probably generally untrue, but they seem like one of the better behaved commercial ones that won't use your bandwidth as an unwitting node in their network (at least from what I can tell, if this is untrue, please correct me).
It's one of those tiny costs that ultimately don't matter, "the principle" of it is sometimes not worth it to me to do anything about. VPN is a generally scummy business from what I can tell.
Buyer beware with "lifetime**" guarantees. The asterisks and fine print often are enlightening.
Scammers always have an out too... go out of business and setup shop under a different name. I remember hearing a local tire shop offering some type of "tires for life" deal. They went "out of business" and the owners started a new shop.
Not defending the use of the FAQ to clarify the clearly misleading marketing.
But part of this article implies that the FAQ was not there at the time of signing up. First I am curious if this is actually true?
If it is, does tmobile have any way of tracking the state of FAQ, contracts, etc at the time of signup instead of just the current version?
Clearly the comments made by the CEO about being an "uncarrier" is plain crap if they pull stuff like this.
When I first saw this I did not think about those that financed their phones through the carrier. That is a pretty horrible situation. Good idea to avoid financing through the carrier anyways and ideally hope the manufacture (like Apple) can do it.
I love the fact that one of the customers used T-Mobile’s own Terms and Conditions to refute the notion that prices could be increased, regardless of the language in the FAQ.
As the article reports, this is what the terms valid at the time said: “If you are on a price-lock guaranteed Rate Plan, we will not increase your monthly recurring Service charge ('Recurring Charge') for the period that applies to your Rate Plan, or, if no specific period applies, for as long as you continuously remain a customer in good standing on a qualifying Rate Plan.”
That’s a pretty massive screw-up on the part of T-Mobile’s legal department. I sure hope this helps the affected customers.
I got the text message warning of the price increase and I have several lines.
Months later my first bill came and they only increased the price on two apple watch lines by $2 a month each so $4 per month increase on a monthly bill in the hundreds. Seemed rather silly actually as I thought I would be paying $40-50 a month more like the someone in the article described.
I thought I would have a much bigger increase, so clearly they have the ability to track which contracts were valid during the period of sign up and that’s encoded into their billing system.
I got screwed over by this for SongKong from JThink. They sold lifetime prices at higher costs. Then it came out that they guy didn't want to honor it anymore and switched to a yearly license. In the yearly he claims "oh i'll give the lifetimers 1 year free and perpetual for the license year you bought when you renew".
Turns out after he doesn't even honor that. I bought a year, and then he won't archive the older versions. Have a broken copy because his api key internally broke? Didn't download all versions during that year.. yea you're shit out of luck.
I'm looking at the "lifetime" app upgrades I paid for in 2016 that, technically, are still active but whose features are all deprecated, meanwhile there are are plenty of new features offered for a $10/mo subscription that the app continues to nag me about.
I would be fine with a company I've bought a "lifetime" service contract from went bankrupt and I lost it that way. That at least makes sense to a consumer and is something they should be able to figure out from a company advertising a negative revenue product. "Lifetime" of the company is fine to me, and is a fine way to judge the value of a "lifetime" product; How likely is this company to still exist in ten years?
This is the reason I don't buy Nebula's $300 lifetime plan. I want the company to succeed and still be here in ten years, so I don't want to take that offer and contribute to their bankruptcy.
I think that's the point. Advertising anything as such should be the contract. It's unambiguous to everyone except the person who's paid to be confused.
Stuff of the form
Claim A*
* Actually not A
Should be illegal. Someone buying a product isn't a lawyer and shouldn't need one. Fine print in take-it-or-leave-it contracts that don't encode a persons reasonable expectation of the purchase agreement should be thrown out and labeled deceptive advertising.
Sounds simple in theory, but not so simple in practice? You can't possibly encode all the legitimate exclusions into a big banner you can advertise, and nobody wants to read an essay to figure out the common case. You'd need to draw the line somewhere and I'm not sure that's an easy boundary to delineate.
More recent news that super irks me, T-Mobile bought a bunch of mmWave spectrum promising to deploy into it, and now are like, oh, sorry it would be expensive to actually meet the requirements & deploy to all this area; can we only take the good areas we want & give up the spectrum everywhere else?
Ok so maybe someone might bite maybe but seems so so unlikely if they can't use the spectrum in any popular spaces!
Structurally this spectrum auction had these conditions, these requirements to deploy broadly, for very obvious reasons. T-Mobile shafting the American public super hard with this non-delivery is so insulting. They should lose the license & pay a fine, fuck this.
> They should lose the license & pay a fine, fuck this.
I've been saying this for years about DISH, they sat on nationwide mid-band AWS spectrum for something like a decade with only a single tower built in Colorado. They only started a network buildout after T-Mobile was forced to make concessions during Sprint merger. This is super useful/valuable spectrum in the 1.6/2.1ghz range, and it was just wasted. They also bid on 600mhz licenses they couldn't use and acted like the good guys when they leased it to other carriers during COVID.
The BRS/EBS (2.5ghz, band 41) spectrum was similarly a mess. The government gave tons of it to schools and nonprofits that would never use it, never had a need for it. They turned around and started their own market to license it out to companies that actually deployed it for LTE and 5G. In my area T-Mobile deployed more of this spectrum than the backhaul can even deliver. I can easily hit 1.4gbps between a few towers, 700mbps off a single tower (because that's the theoretical max after overhead on a 1gbps port). It's possible there's an argument to be made they were hoarding this, but they built it out, it's on-air and usable.
> T-Mobile shafting the American public super hard with this non-delivery is so insulting.
mmwave spectrum is just.... not that valuable? From a physics perspective it's blocked by too much and requires too much density to get effective deployment. They had a prior history of deploying tons of it, just not on the panels, they deployed it as radio backhaul between the towers in areas where fiber wasn't available. This spectrum should probably get light-licensed/flex-licensed because it's only really going to be needed/used in the most dense urban areas and for radio backhaul in challenging terrain.
I think the Trump people were pushing it to “beat China” or something.
In my area, Verizon used some pandemic emergency order to drop mmWave poles all over the place, including in the middle of sidewalks and within a few feet of existing poles. They did it at a frenzy pace, and to date haven’t turned any of them on.
Multiple ISPs bid purely to obstuct other parties from development. It's a chess move for a large business to maintain the status quo. I do agree that financial penalties are the only counter move.
Sorry to report that there is no legal definition of a "lifetime" warranty. The definition should be in the fine print where it can be deemed to mean anything. If it's not in the fine print then it is literally meaningless.
who sold you on that lie? The article has me believing T-Mobile said "your lifetime", given they were also exclusively marketing that to people over the age of 55, it seems obvious that a reasonable person would conclude that meant the remainder of the named individual's life. Which does seem to be the conclusion many people drew, given the number of complaints to the FTC.
Just because lifetime guarantee does often mean "reasonable lifetime of the product", which does differ, and requires reasonable maintenance, doesn't mean you can just make shit up. Otherwise you put yourself in this very position where you need to argue and prove exactly what a reasonable person would conclude the contract meant.
Words don't suddenly become meaningless just because the "fine print" is ambiguous.
Words and phrases definitely have meanings in contract law, established by precident. They are not always what the layman would presume they mean however.
I'll accept that there could be precedent to use non-layman definitions of certain words, but how do you apply that justification to this quote from TFA:
> "T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile One plan," the company said in a pledge that enticed many people to switch plans or even switch from another carrier to T-Mobile.
I don't think it's reasonable to use anything but regular definitions for the words in that particular quote.
Rather, they are pulling this off a completely different way:
> "We are not raising the price of any of our plans; we are moving you to a newer plan with more benefits at a different cost."
So the price of the service is not changing during the reasonable lifetime of the service nor the lifetime of the consumer. Rather, the service is no longer being offered.
And this is probably permitted in the fine print of the offer. They did not just make this up in their marketing department without at least some consideration of the ways they could escape from it.
That is infuriating corp speak. I'm sympathetic if a business can't fulfill its obligations, nobody wants to fail. If they had admitted they messed up and wanted to fix it then I honestly would be okay with that.
But to try to ditch their responsibility with a technicality is so scummy. I don't have T-Mobile, and with that one line of corp speak I never will
The sad thing is T-Mobile knows this and are banking on the fact that ATT or Verizon or pretty much any carrier you go to, will eventually pull something similar.
We seem to have reached a point where there is effectively no place you can get decent customer service as an ordinary consumer. It's either, have enough money to sue the crap out of companies, or shut your mouth and endure.
Decades of demonization of regulations has led to a point where the Govt's ability to enforce them is effectively null. With the regulators out of the picture, T-Mobile knows the only real recourse you have is the courts and that a vanishingly small percentage of customers will take that path.
For sure, I don't mean to say it's right. Just that they don't seem to be leveraging non-layman definitions of words. The plan's price will never change really doesn't imply the plan's existence will never change even to a layman, I would think, unless their train of thought is more like paying for this line than paying for this plan which would be problematic. This is in stark contrast to things like lifetime warranties of physical goods (where "lifetime" needs some legal definition) since some physical goods do indeed last virtually forever.
If money maintained stable value over the long term, companies could honestly make promises about "lifetime" pricing. These promises were probably made during the "low 2%" inflation of the past, but basic economic understanding would point out that such a plan is doomed.
Better yet, in a deflationary monetary regime, a constant price would net the companies more profit over time. Users would probably clamor for lowered prices on these plans, and companies could advertise "Lifetime pricing plans are now cheaper! You get more for less!"
No need to blame inflation. Inflation is not new or secret. T-Mobile knew about inflation when it made promises. It could have included an inflation adjustment in their "uncontract". The blame is squarely on T-Mobile here.
The reason this is more of a scam is that many people are glad to initially pay more in return for a lifetime price lock.
Many of us stuck it out with T-Mobile plans despite better options at the time because we're okay paying more now in return for a guarantee of not paying more later.
If T-Mobile is not honoring this once it no longer benefits them, a minimum penalty should be the price difference between T-Mobile and the cheapest similar option over the lifetime of the plan.
If I paid $50/month, and there was a $30/month option through Mint, MetroPCS, etc. for four years with the same data / talk limit, I should get back a minimum of 48 months * $20 ≈ $1000 (increased by a bit, assuming money was held in an index fund in the meantime).
Part of the reason this matters is many companies use similar lifetime tactics to get started. Nebula has $300 lifetime plans, which provided much of the early capital they needed. If this doesn't work anymore, it pisses in the pool for everyone wanting to do something similar.
It's perfectly fine to have early customers fund you with (eventually money-losing) lifetime plans, to buy marketshare this way, etc. There are a lot of business models which go away if this can't be relied on.
I's say that they should refund to you the entirety of your expected payments over the course of your expected lifetime. That would be their recourse towards you if you were to breach a contract with them, no? If you sign a $50/month contract for 36 months, and back out after 10 months, will they not come after you for $50 * 26 = $1300?
Yea it should cost more to break the contract than to honor it.
This, in a marketplace where words like "purchase" and "unlimited"[1] don't mean what you think they do. "Lifetime" surely can't mean that either.
The FTC has been growing some teeth again, and needs to stay vigilant.
1. https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/01/are-you-for...
Is this even new for "lifetime"?
A "lifetime warranty" often refers to the "lifetime" of the product, not your lifetime or the expected lifetime of any person.
In that sense, T-Mobile has played this pretty straight. Customers got a price lock for the lifetime of the offer.
Just on a quick read, it looks like a "lifetime warranty" must actually define a length of time though. Which for a product you can, at least claim to, stress test or base on the weakest component.
Fastmail is a pretty well-regarded email service here. When they started out, there was a $50 "lifetime" account offer, which I took. They continued to honor this, even after they stopped offering it to new customers. As far as I know they still do, but at some point, I wanted more storage or some other feature, but I'd have to give up that "lifetime" plan to make any changes, so now I'm on a yearly paid plan. I grumbled a bit but they technically kept their word.
I think this is acceptable in all fairness.
It is and it isn't.
I'll give another example of how it might not be:
Google is intentionally screwing around with customers who signed up for an email account with their own domain. This gradually evolved into GSuite/free, Google Workspace, and Google has, at times threatened to wipe out accounts unless people paid, broken services, quite often very intentionally, etc.
Simply harassing people into paying should not be legal. There's a threshold somewhere, but OP should be able to e.g. pay extra on top of the free plan for more storage without giving up the baseline free plan.
It's also bad business. Google lost millions of dollars of business that way, on me, personally. I've had enough bad experiences with Google that I always advise people against doing business with Google. If Google had killed GSuite/free and wiped out my data, it'd be very visible (blog posts and the like), but where we are, it's discreet. If things like my GSuite account continued working, I'd be promoting Google like I used to when it was a quirky don't-be-evil company.
Right now, the things which bug me most: They need to fix Google Voice and enable paying for Google One on individual accounts.
Oh, and on the topic of Google Voice, my landline is about to break as Google just broke Obihai support....
There are a lot of economic texts which talk about how being able to have social capital, defined as for example being able to rely on promises, helps grow economies. Landes is a good example.
That reminds me of Flickr, which took my monthly fee with the promise of lifetime storage for uploaded photos, even if I stopped paying. Of course, they broke that promise. I don’t use them anymore, but some of my friends still do, despite the betrayal of trust.
The backstory is that the company was sold, but I don’t think that’s an excuse. If a buyer is allowed to purchase the business and keep the name and customers, they should take on the previous obligations. Otherwise, they should call it something else or make customers re-register.
Google Photos made a similar promise. They said "as long as you let us optimize your photos, the service will be free and unlimited". I started syncing my photos and I think 12 months later they announced the end of the policy.
I never paid so I'm not really that surprised but it was a quick about-face.
Was it a particularly fast (or even complete) about-face?
They offered it for over 6 years, beginning in May of 2015[0] and ending in June of 2021, with previously-uploaded photos remaining free still today, and they gave ~7 months of warning before changing things[1].
0: https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/google-photos-breaks-free-...
1: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/11/21560810/google-photos-u...
The bitterest irony about photos or similar is it's quite unlikely they really deleted (or will delete) the photos. I mean. What an amazing walled garden data set for image models. Literally the fuel for Meta or twitter's AI. So here they are sitting on your data, taking advantage, training models, etc.. oh but you want to access the data? Oh no, you didn't pay every month, can't help you.
However it does make me wonder if california's consumer privacy act would cover the right to retrieve photographic data such as this.
To be fair, they only made that change for new photos being uploaded. All of the ones uploaded prior are still free.
Which is awesome because I have way more than my drive quota in there.
Alternately they could have decided to "optimize" your photos down to 320p.
OneDrive also promised unlimited storage space for files, and it just lasted a few years.
Of course, most “unlimited” things are impractical from a business point of view. But I think the burden of dealing with this should fall on the companies making unrealistic promises rather than on the customers.
Sorry, they promised to store your photos even if you stopped paying? Was the idea that you couldn't upload new, but you'd still have access to old, or did you have to pay a "get them out of cold storage" fee? Either way, that's a bizarre business model.
Svbtle, a blog hosting service, follows this business model as well: https://svbtle.com/promise
I've let my card lapse on it for a few months and they never deleted anything (I just hadn't been posting either).
They promised to keep the files hosted forever with live URLs so people could see them. I agree; it is a bizarre business model. I recall they had a limit on how much you could upload each month, so I guess they calculated how monthly fees would cover the lifetime storage.
There was no monthly fee.
It feels like a breach of contract. Of course, there is no (formal) contract between the corporation and the individual user, beyond the ToS which generally favors the corp not the user.
If I have 100M users paying $10/mo on an estimated 3 year term, I have essentially $30B revenue spread over 100M not-quite-contracts and can largely ignore any simgle one of them. But over in B2B, if I sold a $30B contract to a customer, you can be very sure the lawyering would be top notch and airtight. This is why regulators like the FTC and concepts like class action are so useful..and so disliked by corporations. I already note the vitriol directed at Lina Khan at the FTC for example.
Lifetime X is a great promise to make when you're trying to grow, but flickr can't provide free storage indefinitely, and at some point, inflation will catch up with T-Mobile's locked-in price.
I'm fine with regulators punishing companies for misleading advertising or not fulfilling their obligations, buy as savvy consumers, we have to also realize forever deals are too good to be true.
This reminds me of when I went in to a Patagonia store to repair a jacket with a “lifetime” warranty. Turns out they define lifetime as the “useful” lifetime of the product, which is a couple years. They refused to help and instead tried to sell me a new jacket.
You should definitely try a different store or employee. I’ve heard nothing but great things about the patagonia lifetime warranty.
I forget who owns Black Diamond, but they're kind of similar.
They haven't fully replaced the product, but what is cool is that they have a repair shop that has been doing free repairs for me. I've sent a very lightweight, very heavily used puffy jacket in twice for repairs at no charge.
Realistically I know that jacket isn't going to last forever, but I respect they are at least trying to help me extract as much life out of it as I can from a sustainability perspective.
It's using less material and less landfill, but I wonder if it really is more sustainable in the grand scheme of things, at the scale of clothing and similarly sized items. The additional round trip shipping and workshop operations (HVAC, lighting, commuting, etc.) could potentially exceed the footprint of just sending you a replacement right off the production line. Obviously there's a crossover point above which this couldn't possibly be (cars, etc.) but it's probably a very blurry line, and I wouldn't be surprised if some companies knowingly take the worse but ostensibly sustainable option, i.e. greenwashing, for the resulting brand loyalty and word of mouth advertising.
You mean HVAC, lighting, shipping (half across the globe probably) isn't involved in purchasing a new thing?
It absolutely is, but [using it for production of new items and using it for a repair shop] might take more resources than [just having the former and supplying some replacements]. What I'm saying is that we can't just compare consumption/waste of materials (which is obviously worse when doing replacement instead of repair) because there are also "overhead" resources required in order to offer repairs. Theoretically, in cases where replacements are better for the bottom line than repairs, it's due to using fewer resources, and the open question is how "green or dirty" those resources are.
If replacement is cheaper only because of geographic differences in wages, then we ought to repair. But if replacement is cheaper because of streamlining the use of nonrenewable electricity and so forth, then we ought to replace.
Both companies were founded by Yvon Chouinard
My Tomtom GPS is like this. I have an older model. "Lifetime maps". For many years, plug it in, new map, download done.
Eventually I try to update it and it says "oh no, do you want to buy a map!?". I mean. What? Doesn't even cost anything to the company to keep on giving me free maps - well I guess it's lost revenue if that they could earn by dishonoring the agreement, which is what they did. Clearly meant to extract more money from me in map purchase or to buy another "lifetime" map.
I have another TomTom on my other vehicle (despite the shitty practices, their kit doesn't randomly crash like Garmin in my experience) which about every 2 days nags me about an update. So here I am, newer model is way too aggressive with updates all the time, old "lifetime map" model is a disaster.
What it is here, is there needs to be legislation that if a company uses "lifetime" or equivalent word in marketing, they are on the hook for life to honor that, with some prescribed action to make customers whole if they should want to drop it.
Now a good guy legend in this field, craftsman tools, for many decades in america people would buy craftsman from their sears knowing they could always go back easily and get a replacement. Sears in the day was like if Wal mart and amazon was the same company. An institution.
Darn tough socks still honor their lifetime warranty no matter how long passes, though obviously no socks can last forever. Generally reading online you find people mentioning you should be reasonable about it.
> you should be reasonable about it.
I don't get it. Shouldn't it be the seller's obligation to give a reasonable lifetime estimate? Like, give me a five year warranty, if you want to advertise your socks last for five years of regular use. Don't pretend it's unlimited when it isn't.
>Shouldn't it be the seller's obligation to give a reasonable lifetime estimate?
Not sure how you define this or maintain it. These socks are guaranteed for 100 wears? Can't count wears. These socks last a year. Is that daily wear? One of 10 pairs? Only air dried? Was the user running daily marathons?
You can extend this to pretty much every product.
>last for five years of regular use.
What's regular use?
buncha people caught wind and purchase the product used/torn for pennies on the dollar, and send it in, in order to take advantage of the offer (and the retailer).
Statement still stands. The company can't afford lifetime because of this possibility. They should change the terms. They could say single owner lifetime or something like that.
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Tilley hats as well. It was probably twenty years on, and both of ours fell apart enough to call about their lifetime (“put it in your will!”) warranty. Other than arguing that Tilley never made that model of hat, they sent us an equivalent without fuss.
By that standard we would have "lifetime" warranty on everything sold in The Nederlands, since by law we require warranty as long as you can reasonably expect a product to last.
Hmm that doesn't sound right. I just got a 10 year old jacket which had damage I had caused (so not normal wear and tear) for free
I had nearly the opposite experience, getting a jacket of over 20 years replaced after I brought it in. You should go back and try again.
The warranty is for the lifetime of the product. If it breaks, obviously its lifetime has ended so the warranty is no longer in effect...
Indeed, a reasonable person would find that its usefulness has tanked!
Yeah this is odd.
I've taken multiple 10 year old T-Shirts with holes through 10% of them in to the Patagonia store and they've let me walk out with new product off the rack.
I wonder if you'd have luck in small claims court.
This is how I got MSI to honour their warranty in spite of their stance that any failure at all is due to user error, since their products don't fail
I have the opposite experience with warranty.
I had a defective ATX psu cable and MSI support sent me a whole cables kit overnight. And recently a bought a Corsair case, the iCue controller had 2 defective ports and Corsair also sent me a replacement overnight.
My only "trick" with support is telling them upfront that I will leave a 5 stars review on amazon uppon successful resolution of the problem.
Wow, nice. Did they show up? Did they settle?
Settled at the eleventh hour
LL Bean are the OG of this, and they will warranty stuff that is 25 years old without batting an eye
Not anymore. I had a pair of boots that one of the soles fell off of one day. They were about 20 years old but still in good shape except for the glue failure. I called up LL Bean and they said they had no record of the purchase (I didn’t have a receipt but I bought them directly from them). After I insisted I had bought from them they changed their tune to saying 20 years is long enough and I should know that glue on the soles of shoes fails after a while. I just wanted them to repair the boots but they refused, so I won’t be buying anything from them anymore.
this may be one of the most entitled comments ive ever read on this website.
Here was their old guarantee: "Our products are guaranteed to give 100% satisfaction in every way. Return anything purchased from us at any time if it proves otherwise. We do not want you to have anything from L.L. Bean that is not completely satisfactory."
Are you not satisfied by boots which lasted 20 years?
If they had just worn out, that's fine, but they weren't at all. I only use them maybe 5-10 times per year, so the sole still had tons of life in it. The problem is that they didn't sew the sole onto the boot upper and the glue they used just lets go after a while.
I don't think that the soles should just fall off your boots one day while you're hiking, so no, I was not completely satisfied and I would like them to glue the soles back on for me.
Interesting. Do you remember if the boots were LL Bean brand name?
I'm sad to hear the bulletproof policy has come to an end.
Yes they were Bean Cresta Hikers. I really liked them.
Does Zippo predate that?
I think Leatherman have a similar warranty to Zippo, and they've been around a while, too.
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I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further. --Darth Vader
Seriously though, this is one of the things that we need strong consumer protections for.
But also don't be a complete rube as a customer. Caveat Emptor. If a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There is an escape clause somewhere in the fine print, you'll find it if you read it.
Taken to the logical extreme, you wouldn't buy anything because any promise made by a vendor is fake.
People used social proof of Tmobile's lifetime pricing for years. Then new management comes in, and they can renege on existing contracts?
That should be illegal unless you think contracts are BS too.
No, I don't think contracts are BS, but I also have lived long enough to know that any time words like "free" and "lifetime" or "always" or "never" are used in a marketing campaign, there's always a catch.
Buying something like this as a 30y old? Yeah, probably garbage.
But if I read that correctly that they specifically marketed that to retired people or close to retiring... it kinda sounds different. 55 to 75 (or whatever the average lifespan was when this was up), you might want to think they thought this through. Lifelong rental agreements after selling your property are not uncommon in some countries, and you should know that you're gambling.
Maybe it's not the exact same thing, but I got suckered into a similar thing for a "lifetime" NordVPN subscription for $120 or something, only to get re-billed 2 years later. I like the service so I kept it, but it really rankled me. Seems like you shouldn't be able to do things like this so easily - companies, especially telecoms, have gone full "fuck you" mode the last 10 years to their customers and this is a prime example.
There are VPNs out there with better business practices. You'll find these are ones that don't blow disproportionate amounts of money on advertising strategies like "carpet bomb you with influencer endorsements"
I have my own VPN I setup for anything serious. I like the interface and convenience of this one better than anything else, but yea, I agree. Their claim also that they don't keep logs or give any user info away I know is disputed and probably generally untrue, but they seem like one of the better behaved commercial ones that won't use your bandwidth as an unwitting node in their network (at least from what I can tell, if this is untrue, please correct me).
It's one of those tiny costs that ultimately don't matter, "the principle" of it is sometimes not worth it to me to do anything about. VPN is a generally scummy business from what I can tell.
Buyer beware with "lifetime**" guarantees. The asterisks and fine print often are enlightening.
Scammers always have an out too... go out of business and setup shop under a different name. I remember hearing a local tire shop offering some type of "tires for life" deal. They went "out of business" and the owners started a new shop.
This article seems to be quoting a lot of individual comments, rather than giving a concise summary of the situation.
Not defending the use of the FAQ to clarify the clearly misleading marketing.
But part of this article implies that the FAQ was not there at the time of signing up. First I am curious if this is actually true?
If it is, does tmobile have any way of tracking the state of FAQ, contracts, etc at the time of signup instead of just the current version?
Clearly the comments made by the CEO about being an "uncarrier" is plain crap if they pull stuff like this.
When I first saw this I did not think about those that financed their phones through the carrier. That is a pretty horrible situation. Good idea to avoid financing through the carrier anyways and ideally hope the manufacture (like Apple) can do it.
I love the fact that one of the customers used T-Mobile’s own Terms and Conditions to refute the notion that prices could be increased, regardless of the language in the FAQ.
As the article reports, this is what the terms valid at the time said: “If you are on a price-lock guaranteed Rate Plan, we will not increase your monthly recurring Service charge ('Recurring Charge') for the period that applies to your Rate Plan, or, if no specific period applies, for as long as you continuously remain a customer in good standing on a qualifying Rate Plan.”
That’s a pretty massive screw-up on the part of T-Mobile’s legal department. I sure hope this helps the affected customers.
I got the text message warning of the price increase and I have several lines.
Months later my first bill came and they only increased the price on two apple watch lines by $2 a month each so $4 per month increase on a monthly bill in the hundreds. Seemed rather silly actually as I thought I would be paying $40-50 a month more like the someone in the article described.
I thought I would have a much bigger increase, so clearly they have the ability to track which contracts were valid during the period of sign up and that’s encoded into their billing system.
It is likely a frog boiling. You didn't complain on the $2 / month increase. They'll now try a $2 increase every six months.
I got screwed over by this for SongKong from JThink. They sold lifetime prices at higher costs. Then it came out that they guy didn't want to honor it anymore and switched to a yearly license. In the yearly he claims "oh i'll give the lifetimers 1 year free and perpetual for the license year you bought when you renew".
Turns out after he doesn't even honor that. I bought a year, and then he won't archive the older versions. Have a broken copy because his api key internally broke? Didn't download all versions during that year.. yea you're shit out of luck.
I'm looking at the "lifetime" app upgrades I paid for in 2016 that, technically, are still active but whose features are all deprecated, meanwhile there are are plenty of new features offered for a $10/mo subscription that the app continues to nag me about.
Absolute lol, I never trust those lifetime price locks unless it's enforceable by contract.
I don't trust them regardless. AFAIK, they're effectively voided by bankruptcy.
So a company can profit from such claims, and then ultimately go bankrupt to protect those already-dispersed profits.
(IANAL, so I'm probably missing some major caveats.)
I would be fine with a company I've bought a "lifetime" service contract from went bankrupt and I lost it that way. That at least makes sense to a consumer and is something they should be able to figure out from a company advertising a negative revenue product. "Lifetime" of the company is fine to me, and is a fine way to judge the value of a "lifetime" product; How likely is this company to still exist in ten years?
This is the reason I don't buy Nebula's $300 lifetime plan. I want the company to succeed and still be here in ten years, so I don't want to take that offer and contribute to their bankruptcy.
I think that's the point. Advertising anything as such should be the contract. It's unambiguous to everyone except the person who's paid to be confused.
Stuff of the form
Claim A*
* Actually not A
Should be illegal. Someone buying a product isn't a lawyer and shouldn't need one. Fine print in take-it-or-leave-it contracts that don't encode a persons reasonable expectation of the purchase agreement should be thrown out and labeled deceptive advertising.
> Stuff of the form
> Claim A*
> * Actually not A
> Should be illegal.
Sounds simple in theory, but not so simple in practice? You can't possibly encode all the legitimate exclusions into a big banner you can advertise, and nobody wants to read an essay to figure out the common case. You'd need to draw the line somewhere and I'm not sure that's an easy boundary to delineate.
This was enforceable by contract...
More recent news that super irks me, T-Mobile bought a bunch of mmWave spectrum promising to deploy into it, and now are like, oh, sorry it would be expensive to actually meet the requirements & deploy to all this area; can we only take the good areas we want & give up the spectrum everywhere else?
Ok so maybe someone might bite maybe but seems so so unlikely if they can't use the spectrum in any popular spaces!
Structurally this spectrum auction had these conditions, these requirements to deploy broadly, for very obvious reasons. T-Mobile shafting the American public super hard with this non-delivery is so insulting. They should lose the license & pay a fine, fuck this.
https://www.lightreading.com/5g/t-mobile-relinquishes-mmwave...
> They should lose the license & pay a fine, fuck this.
I've been saying this for years about DISH, they sat on nationwide mid-band AWS spectrum for something like a decade with only a single tower built in Colorado. They only started a network buildout after T-Mobile was forced to make concessions during Sprint merger. This is super useful/valuable spectrum in the 1.6/2.1ghz range, and it was just wasted. They also bid on 600mhz licenses they couldn't use and acted like the good guys when they leased it to other carriers during COVID.
The BRS/EBS (2.5ghz, band 41) spectrum was similarly a mess. The government gave tons of it to schools and nonprofits that would never use it, never had a need for it. They turned around and started their own market to license it out to companies that actually deployed it for LTE and 5G. In my area T-Mobile deployed more of this spectrum than the backhaul can even deliver. I can easily hit 1.4gbps between a few towers, 700mbps off a single tower (because that's the theoretical max after overhead on a 1gbps port). It's possible there's an argument to be made they were hoarding this, but they built it out, it's on-air and usable.
> T-Mobile shafting the American public super hard with this non-delivery is so insulting.
mmwave spectrum is just.... not that valuable? From a physics perspective it's blocked by too much and requires too much density to get effective deployment. They had a prior history of deploying tons of it, just not on the panels, they deployed it as radio backhaul between the towers in areas where fiber wasn't available. This spectrum should probably get light-licensed/flex-licensed because it's only really going to be needed/used in the most dense urban areas and for radio backhaul in challenging terrain.
I think the Trump people were pushing it to “beat China” or something.
In my area, Verizon used some pandemic emergency order to drop mmWave poles all over the place, including in the middle of sidewalks and within a few feet of existing poles. They did it at a frenzy pace, and to date haven’t turned any of them on.
Did you actually expect anyone to deploy mmWave outside of stadiums, concert venues, and transit centers, and possibly a few blocks in NYC?
It's not usable spectrum for mass deployment.
They did in cities as a cable displacement strategy. I have a little tower on my front lawn, idle.
AT&T deployed in Baltimore. Verizon and TMobile in Manhattan, and I know Vz used Schenectady, NY as a pilot city.
A decent chunk of Chicago is covered by mmWave
Multiple ISPs bid purely to obstuct other parties from development. It's a chess move for a large business to maintain the status quo. I do agree that financial penalties are the only counter move.
Sorry to report that there is no legal definition of a "lifetime" warranty. The definition should be in the fine print where it can be deemed to mean anything. If it's not in the fine print then it is literally meaningless.
who sold you on that lie? The article has me believing T-Mobile said "your lifetime", given they were also exclusively marketing that to people over the age of 55, it seems obvious that a reasonable person would conclude that meant the remainder of the named individual's life. Which does seem to be the conclusion many people drew, given the number of complaints to the FTC.
Just because lifetime guarantee does often mean "reasonable lifetime of the product", which does differ, and requires reasonable maintenance, doesn't mean you can just make shit up. Otherwise you put yourself in this very position where you need to argue and prove exactly what a reasonable person would conclude the contract meant.
Words don't suddenly become meaningless just because the "fine print" is ambiguous.
Words and phrases definitely have meanings in contract law, established by precident. They are not always what the layman would presume they mean however.
I'll accept that there could be precedent to use non-layman definitions of certain words, but how do you apply that justification to this quote from TFA:
> "T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile One plan," the company said in a pledge that enticed many people to switch plans or even switch from another carrier to T-Mobile.
I don't think it's reasonable to use anything but regular definitions for the words in that particular quote.
Rather, they are pulling this off a completely different way:
> "We are not raising the price of any of our plans; we are moving you to a newer plan with more benefits at a different cost."
So the price of the service is not changing during the reasonable lifetime of the service nor the lifetime of the consumer. Rather, the service is no longer being offered.
> Rather, the service is no longer being offered.
And this is probably permitted in the fine print of the offer. They did not just make this up in their marketing department without at least some consideration of the ways they could escape from it.
That is infuriating corp speak. I'm sympathetic if a business can't fulfill its obligations, nobody wants to fail. If they had admitted they messed up and wanted to fix it then I honestly would be okay with that.
But to try to ditch their responsibility with a technicality is so scummy. I don't have T-Mobile, and with that one line of corp speak I never will
The sad thing is T-Mobile knows this and are banking on the fact that ATT or Verizon or pretty much any carrier you go to, will eventually pull something similar.
We seem to have reached a point where there is effectively no place you can get decent customer service as an ordinary consumer. It's either, have enough money to sue the crap out of companies, or shut your mouth and endure.
Decades of demonization of regulations has led to a point where the Govt's ability to enforce them is effectively null. With the regulators out of the picture, T-Mobile knows the only real recourse you have is the courts and that a vanishingly small percentage of customers will take that path.
For sure, I don't mean to say it's right. Just that they don't seem to be leveraging non-layman definitions of words. The plan's price will never change really doesn't imply the plan's existence will never change even to a layman, I would think, unless their train of thought is more like paying for this line than paying for this plan which would be problematic. This is in stark contrast to things like lifetime warranties of physical goods (where "lifetime" needs some legal definition) since some physical goods do indeed last virtually forever.
This article isn't about warranties? I'm confused what your comment is referring to.
Blame inflation.
If money maintained stable value over the long term, companies could honestly make promises about "lifetime" pricing. These promises were probably made during the "low 2%" inflation of the past, but basic economic understanding would point out that such a plan is doomed.
Better yet, in a deflationary monetary regime, a constant price would net the companies more profit over time. Users would probably clamor for lowered prices on these plans, and companies could advertise "Lifetime pricing plans are now cheaper! You get more for less!"
Inflation isn't a new concept and certainly one that T-Mobile could have (and should have) considered if this were the reason.
No need to blame inflation. Inflation is not new or secret. T-Mobile knew about inflation when it made promises. It could have included an inflation adjustment in their "uncontract". The blame is squarely on T-Mobile here.