Won’t they lose money in the long run? I can’t think of any reasons why a company wants to do this unless they are selling your data.
Lifetime of the company or product not the lifetime of the customer.
So someone pays eg $350 for lifetime, but a subscription costs $100/yr
- Company now has cash in hand.
- If company closes after 3yrs, they’ve made money.
- If company doesn’t close until at least 4yrs, then it represents good value for money for customer, hence, some people take the risk.
I got one like that almost two years ago for 30USD. They worked great for little over a year, then they just disappeared. Servers went down, support was nowhere to be found, … About a month ago they got back, my subscription still works, but the service is terrible: couple of very slow servers. After they initially went down I bought a well-known VPN service and it works great.
You get sucked into something which may be a horrible service.
NEVER do a lifetime sub… NEVER do anything over one year
Probably something like this. Each server costs $30 per year(bare min), you pay 100 for life for a service you may or may not utilize 100%. They then have cash for 3 more servers a year(if they decide to invest that money that way) or run that same server for 3 years. Of course they can simply offer a service that has a hidden bandwith throughput and limit you.
Basically you will see vpns that say lifetime on stack social but are very bad or not known. Once signed up you can’t switch until you have paid for the length of time the normal monthly rate costs. I got a zenmate lifetime subscription and in fairness it was a lifetime because of how bad the vpn is I’d rather had skipped and got a good subscription deal to another mentioned on privacytools.io
Better to convert a free user into SOME money rather than have them just stay a free user forever. Would be even better to convert them into a monthly-paid user, but one-shot-paid is better than nothing.
There is no logic, and certainly be wary of any company providing a life-time subscription. Servers are not free, we know, as we run many.
Quite popular amongst startups because of that initial cash injection. You’ll often see these kinds of offers in the first free years, after which a company folds or removes the offer.
Good example - Ooma VOIP phone service.
When they started many years ago they were offering free unlimited lifetime phone service – you just needed to pay for equipment - about $250. You don’t pay anything for the service, nor even telecom taxes, which was weird.
Well, I still have that device and account. It still works. I still pay nothing. They still cover telecom taxes for me (about $4/month). That’s over $600 in total by now 
Sometimes they entice me to switch to a “better” plan with some minor features added but on new plans you’ll have to pay taxes yourself. So I keep my plan.
As an early adopter I have supported the company in the early days when they needed cash most, but other than that they keep losing money on me ever since. Way more than I paid and that not counting hardware cost or service. And everybody is happy.
Had exactly same experience
What vpn service was it you brought?
In reality you do get sucked in go onto stack social and look at the vpns on offer. What’s more what vpns would you trust. Vpns on privacytools.io or stack social?
Help. I’ve already lived 30 times too long! What do I do?
Please let me know where you can find an decent unmetered server for 30 dollars per year.
Lowendtalk.com. plenty of unmetered for that
Yeah… start moving TBs of bandwidth on those plans…
It wont last long.
That’s you request a plan to cater to your needs. It’s not hard to figure out really. From experience it works out fine for me. To the uninitiated, I can see why it seems impossible.