Technology

As far as a lifetime subscription to Nebula, I’ve watched way too many sites fail/die to consider a lifetime subscription to anything on the internet. They could shut the site down tomorrow, and now I’m out $500 ($300 if I happen to get a discount from a creator code).

There's no "happen to". It's the default expectation. You can go through literally any creator on the site to get that, it's not a time-limited thing or anything like that.

As for the rest of it, it's certainly a possibility. But it will only take 10 years before that lifetime membership becomes strictly better than paying yearly. And the reason they're doing it is to avoid one of the biggest sources of companies with fundamentally-sound businesses going bankrupt: investors deciding they want to squeeze. They use the lifetime memberships as an alternative to seeking outside investment from venture capital. And from what we've seen, it certainly does appear to be a fundamentally sound business. It has seemed to be growing in both the amount and the range of content it offers at a pretty steady rate, and all indications are that their subscriber count is growing along with that.

It certainly is a risk, without a doubt. There's a reason Nebula themselves say that the objectively best option is the yearly membership. Lifetime membership is directly presented by them as an investment you can make in the company; something to do because you believe in what they're doing and want to help them, with the potential for some payoff down the line (but honestly not very much).