2) While I admit that I'm guilty of it too, overpromising is pretty destructive. It causes you to have to work harder and give stuff for free to deliver, but that in turn causes other people to have to do that too. If overpromising is very common, then that would mean the market is artificially lower, which is why you have people scrambling all the time doing quick and dirty fixes for everything and lots of companies with horrible work-life balance. It would probably be good for the industry if overpromising were a shameful taboo and not just a simple slipup.

You should not have empathy for a company.

I’m no lawyer… so feel free to correct me if anyone is… but it looked like the origins of a “corporation is a person” came from simple administrative needs. That it would be unrealistic to make someone indivdually sue each shareholder separately instead od bundling them into one suit and treating the corporation as “one person”.

Sure seems like we’ve lost the plot then. In addition to the situations pointed to above, a corporation doesn’t sign up for the military draft, get taxed on their gross income, pay social security, do jury duty, vote in election, etc, etc, etc.

No empathy. Companies have no right not to die or be killed. Society doesn’t need to prop up your business model.

The earlier comment called ending free lifetime updates/service “incredibly scummy behavior.” That seems way off to me. In the pantheon of bad corporate behavior that’s not even a 1 out of 10 in severity. It’s “disappointing behavior” but not surprising or IMO particularly bad. None of us is entitled to free service from others. That’s just not how the world works long term. Nice if you can get it but don’t be surprised when it ends.

By the way I think you’re right that it’s destructive behavior - one company does this, competitors face pressure to do the same. But I am not sure acting like it’s a shameful moral outrage to overpromise is a good solution. The problem isn’t morality, it’s bad incentives, with “10X or bust” VC thinking at the root. I don’t hate the players I hate the game.

Or a freelance contractor/handyman only do half a job?

And as for human flakiness... yes it's there. It feels different somehow but I can't put my finger on it. The last example feels most relevant... the contractor finishing half a job. That would be considered pretty shady, and I think for good reason.

I see that mistakes are made, and they need to be fixed when they become obvious (usually other people have to fix them than the people who made them). But there's no expectation that making and fixing such a mistake should be free, without impact on reputation and customers' goodwill.

Using language with a specific meaning with no intention to actually honor what you're offering is fraud.

True if you say forever you should be held to it, on the other hand if someone says forever to you you should hopefully be clever enough to realize they can't do it because forever is unknowable.

But once again I seem to have run up against the great moral pillars of HN for noting that you should not believe forever when you hear it because well, whatever.

What "free" user? Didn't they paid a fee to get app with forever updates? So they given cash? When it comes to contracts what matters is how much money they can spend on lawyers/experts and how much political clout they have.

If the company doesn't want to 'come up against reality' they shouldn't make offers they can't deliver.

All I'm saying here is that the customer should come first, even if the company finds it hard or costly to do what they said they will. That isn't controversial.

I would say it's not any consumer's responsibility to know that but when it does not hold it may be expected that the cynics who did not expect it to hold point sideways and chuckle because believing "forever" when you hear it is a bit too doe-eyed with wonder, even though you should probably be recompensed in some way.

In other words, I thought you were expressing the idea that businesses offering "forever" and then pulling back are not to be held accountable because that's business, rather than what (I now think) you meant, that was that one should never trust a business ostensibly offering something "forever".

> But Mattermost is breaking the “free forever” promise made to its customers, and without any acknowledgement or apology. The “free forever” note was quietly removed from Mattermost’s website in the month leading up to the announcement, and is never mentioned in the email Mattermost sent to affected customers. Surely, one can expect better than that from a company whose stated principles include “customer obsession” and “earn trust”.

One should expect better but one should also expect such words to be basically bullshit too.

I'm not defending them or suggesting you shouldn't be angry about this; merely suggesting that being cynical of such claims at the outset is advisable.

> We make to maximize the trust of others in our judgments. We are open, self-critical, and factual.

They don't seem to restrict it to customers.

[1] https://mattermost.com/about-us/

You would deserve ALL the vitriol. That's the risk you take. I mean, vitriol is just words and you will live. If anything, as a lawyer, I might go looking for "did they create a contract" as well.

But tech companies promising free things and going back on them, or delivering poorly, is probably literally the worst thing about tech these days.

It's not because they are evil persons. It's because when that promise and trust is broken, I need to severely rethink about other thing. If they ever comes out with NPO financial report or even a formal apology, I'm fine - I mean I'm mad a bit, but not angry. They tried something and it doesn't work, like every success story (or failure story that no one asks) things do go south. But if the solution of the company is secretly hiding it or even publicly denying it (not in this case but that kind of stuff did happen before), then they are not getting a penny from me.

As making cloud storage free for everyone without ads forever is not quite possible nor sustainable, unless you farms telemetry for money (GDrive, dropbox with insane telemetry found recently). It is purely understandable and predictable the business model will die some day, and it's definitely not to blame them for not being able to keep this forever. This is not QE4 and money is not printed in house. But apology and even a changelog is free and it definitely cost more to try to hide it then be honest with it. That's a misdemeanor to perjury for me.

I have. But then I worked my butt off to make it right. If I still failed, then I apologised and owned it. I didn't pretend it never happened.

I think it's worth noting, what incentives are at play here. It's not a neutral mistake: By claiming "free forever" you are heavily frontloading your adoption/marketing and I have to assume you are not just doing that by accident.

So unless, in the worst case, you are ready to fail your company over keeping the promise, just don't ever claim "forever".

But companies love to put labels on things like this with seemingly little thought.

Offering something for free with the 'forever' label on it is I believe deliberate - trying to distance themselves from others who have offered a free plan, but either pulled the rug once they got popular, or snuck in conditions or time limits.

If they had withdrawn the free plan from new customers, but grandfathered in existing users they would have kept their promise and earned at least some good-will.

If we don't call this fraud what stops bad actors from just lying to you to get you to buy in?

You want absolution for your mistakes, go to Confession.

For the rest of us, back pressure is what makes our giant distributed system called Civilization work.

Sure, but I own my mistakes and accept that it's on me to live with the consequences. When a company axes its "free forever" accounts it's passing the consequences of the mistake on to the users. I contend that is making the outcome of the mistake worse rather than better. I don't see how you can argue it's a good thing that people should just accept.

If you offered impossible lifetime deals you should have gone bankrupt before the honest diligent company that did their math and then didn't, not had a decade of eating their cake.

We can't take back all the benefits of fraud, but we can force companies to burn everything to meet obligations so that future ones are less inclined to put on rose colored glasses and start making fraudulent offers.

Companies who make such outrages plans/claims to attract more user (and hence cash flow), can't simply be just forgiven, people invest there time and money on such things. A single mistake (or eliberate plans) by such company waste thousands of hours of valid time/money of users who placed their faith in the claims/plans. There is no excuse to lies,which waste time/money of people.

I do my outright best not to avoid over-promising, since over promising can cause harm to others. Consider two parties here: the customer and the the competition. The harm to the customer is rather obvious since the terms have been changed for them. It would manifest itself in higher costs, the need to alter their work, or both. One could argue that they should not have depended upon a free tier, but ... the same cannot be said for the competition which was offering a real product. They have to deal with (potential) customers who were pulled away by a snake-oil salesman. While my wording is likely unduly harsh. Given how quickly the changes were made, the free tier was likely a poorly thought out plan rather than a malicious one, it is important to remember that an attempt to draw in customers is often intended to pull them away from others. You better be sure you can live up to your word.

Classic bait and switch. Embarrassing to find this sort of scam being defended here on HN.

> i understand the outrage but remember the people on the other side of that screen are just humans too. many things dont turn out the way the initial intention was (im not excusing this specific instance, im just hoping for less vitriol when i someday make some over promising mistake in future). let he who is without sin…

If you can't deliver what you promised then giving all the money back or portion depending on percentage completed is only ethical solution. You are not entitled to other people money because they fell for your lies. Otherwise I have "electric" car rolling down the hill I'm willing to sell to you.

I wonder if some of the outrage is conflating; - free forever for 0 cost - $X for lifetime access

If I paid money for lifetime access and then some time later that was removed I would be angry

It is perfectly possible if your marginal cost is low/zero. The value of a product has nothing to do with its cost. The paying customers on higher tiers will easily subsidise the free for life plans.

If you have no paying customers, well, then your product is at the end of its life anyway.

I, for example, am a paying customer of JetBrains tools and all I get is to be able to download updates. It would probably cost them a few cents a year if they stopped charging me and provided updates for free, forever.

Contracts also mean little if no money changes hands and both parties have zero liability. They mean about the same as the pinky promise made in first grade to be friends 'forever'.

Stay away if it's paid from VC money.