Stop buying lifetime subscriptions to services! They’re not sustainable!
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Technology
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Any time I see a lifetime subscription, I think to myself "Is that supposed to last for my lifetime, or your lifetime?"
Whichever is shorter. Hard to provide a service when either party doesn't exist any more.
I bought some big lifetime thing to astraweb, then the usenet indexer i had used for years shut down. 15 years later I log into astraweb and they have converted my purchase to a set data amount.
Lifetime never means your lifetime. It's the lifetime if the offer or if you're lucky, the current ownership of the company. I've always weighed them as, is this cost significantly less than the cost of the product over the amount of time I think the product might be useful to me and the development of the product is likely to stay on track.
I have one for Plex that I got very early on and was well worth it even though I'm moving away from Plex. And one for 1TB of storage on rsync.net which will pay for itself in 5 years and hopefully will survive for another 5 after that at least for me to consider it more than worth it. After that it's all bonus. I don't expect it to be around in 20 years or for it to be worth nearly as much then either as storage needs grow and costs shrink. But when I got it a couple of years ago I deemed it worth the gamble.