Subscriptions are becoming increasingly common these days, from entertainment to productivity and even printer ink. For customers looking for a deal, many businesses offer an annual plan where you pay for a year in exchange for some kind of discount. If you have the funds on hand and know you're going to use the subscription, this tends to be a win-win: the business gets paid upfront and you get a better deal and don't have to worry about monthly costs.
For cloud storage, these plans sometimes go a step (or staircase) further. There are some cloud storage providers that offer a Lifetime plan, where you pay once and never have to worry about it again. Others tout an unlimited storage plan, claiming you'll never have to worry about storage space. But what do those terms really mean? Are unlimited and lifetime storage plans too good to be true?
Spoilers: Yes they are.
How long's a lifetime?
How long is a piece of string? It all depends on the specifics. But there's one thing that a lifetime is not: infinite. Nothing lives forever, as much as the media would like to have you believe that no one's ever really gone. So the big question is, how long is a lifetime when it comes to subscriptions, and how long can you reasonably expect to use the service?
Answer: It depends.
The Problem with lifetime users
A lifetime user is a one-and-done revenue generator. That's it. Unless there are new, critical features that aren't included in the plan that convince a lifetime user to switch, after that one payment, a lifetime user will never bring in more money. Lifetime users are often used to jumpstart a business, giving a bigger influx of revenue so the business can develop critical features and bring in enough regular customers to become sustainable. But after they cross the break-even point, the user becomes a cost that keeps going further into the negative the longer they continue to use the service.
A lifetime subscription isn't forever. So what does a lifetime subscription actually mean? And what can stop it from being honored? There are several things that cut down your lifetime subscription and can make it a much worse deal than it might seem at first glance.
Bankruptcy
Perhaps the most common way to lose out on your lifetime plan is for the company to go out of business. In that case, the lifetime of the company will be the endpoint. After all, if there's no one to offer the service anymore, nobody can make use of it.
In most cases, there's nothing you can do about a company going bankrupt. If the price of the lifetime is say, 2x the price of the one-year plan, and you think the company will still exist after two years, it could be a money saver once that time is up. Of course, that's assuming nothing else comes up to stop the plan from being valid.
Mergers and Acquisitions
Mergers and Acquisitions are a bit of a gray area when it comes to lifetime subscriptions. Depending on the specifics of the deal, the new entity may be obligated to honor the old plans, but that's not always the case.
In some cases, even when a company isn't obligated to honor the existing lifetime plans, they still will for goodwill or to avoid reputational damage. Even when the lifetime plan gets discontinued after the merger (like is often the case), some companies will grandfather existing users while new sign-ups have to use one of the new plans.
Marketing Terms vs Terms and Conditions
What a company says in marketing vs what the terms and conditions say might be different, and while it's poor form to refer to Ts&Cs when doing a bait and switch, it's not technically illegal, depending on how it's handled.
One large-scale event where this happened is with T-Mobile's lifetime price lock. While the marketing phrasing made it sound like the pricing was locked in for life, the official terms and conditions simply stated that if a user was unhappy, they could cancel and have their final bill paid for by the company. Though "price for life" is much different than paying the costs of a single bill, the information was available on the website (if someone knew to look for it), so the company may not be liable. A class-action lawsuit is ongoing as of this writing.
The main thing to keep in mind though is that when getting a "lifetime" deal, always check the nitty gritty terms for the actual terms of the deal.
Unlimited Cloud Storage
There's no such thing as truly unlimited storage. Even though it's in a digital state, storage still takes resources to store information and keep it accessible for users.
At one point, a lot of the major cloud storage providers offered an unlimited plan. Dropbox and Google both had an unlimited tier that has since been discontinued. Nowadays, the largest cloud storage providers have dropped the unlimited option in favor of a default amount like 5TB per user in business accounts with the option to request more if needed. This gives the provider the power to grant additional storage in increments instead of a blanket unlimited plan, charge more for additional storage, or simply refuse if they want to.
The end of lifetimes and caps of unlimited
Since lifetime and unlimited plans are continuously shown to be unsustainable in the long term, how can companies offer them and eventually retain users but on a different plan? Are they legally allowed to move users?
That depends on the specifics of the terms and conditions. But even when they aren't, there are a few ways that companies can stop these storage users that have become costs.
Hobbling accounts
Some lifetime and unlimited cloud storage users have noticed degraded performance on their accounts. While this can't necessarily always be attributed to being a deliberate degradation, these accounts will almost certainly have a lower priority for updates and new features. In fact, a lot of time the accounts won't get any updates at all, using the enticement of new, better features as a way to lure them off of the current plan.
Banning accounts
Storing illegal content is well, illegal, and cloud storage providers don't want to be complicit in illegal activities. Depending on the specific platform, provider admins may be able to access or "read" the data in personal storage accounts.
One way that cloud storage providers check this is by checking for copyrighted material or illegal content. One cloud storage provider, for example, does this by "hash file organization" to check for content known to be breaking their terms and conditions, or content that is subject to copyright and has been shared with other users.
However, some lifetime subscription users claim to have had their accounts banned without having stored any illegal or copyrighted material, or without sharing anything at all, ever. If a storage provider bans a user for something breaking the terms, it can be hard to prove innocence. And if that user just so happens to be one that's costing the company money because they're on a lifetime plan from the early days? Yep.
While there are users of lifetime storage plans claiming to be targeted because of their plan, even if it isn't the case it's still helpful to know that some providers have the power to ban accounts at their discretion, meaning you could lose access to all the data within that cloud.
Forced plan switching
Sometimes, there's no need to play tricks to get someone off of a lifetime or unlimited cloud storage plan. Sometimes, the company can just force a user to switch plans.
For a while, Google offered unlimited storage to educational institutions but has since transitioned those unlimited plans to a plan with capped data. While this was fine for certain institutions, ones above their quota would be transitioned to a read-only state if they didn't switch to a new (and much more expensive) plan, meaning the data wouldn't be erased but no additional data could be added to the account. Others were marked for deletion.
Users on these plans were notified that they were being switched and that they had no choice in the matter. Some were given a short timeframe like 30 days to either delete files or purchase more storage or their account would be suspended and in some cases, the data would be erased.
Why this is important to mention is because if some of the biggest, most profitable companies in the world couldn't do unlimited plans, how likely is it that a small startup will be able to keep it up for the price of a couple cups of coffee per month? That's not to say that unlimited plans are a scam or not worthwhile; they can be good value in the short term, but eventually, there's sure to come a point where it becomes unsustainable and will no longer be offered.
If you plan on using an unlimited plan, have a backup plan of what you'll do with your data in case your plan stops being offered, such as a data migration plan for migrating to a new storage provider.
Need to migrate from your current storage provider?
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