it's kinda shitty of them to cancel it, but not like the situations where people have tried to buy "lifetime" subscriptions to some SaaS product by paying a large up-front cost, and then having it cancelled.
Sounds like a lifetime guarantee to me.
typically, purchasing something with a lifetime guarantee requires an up-front payment to secure the lifetime guarantee. it seemed like some people here might have been under the assumption that was the situation with google music. i just wanted to make it clear what the actual situation is.
Unless I missed some big news, Google hasn't been bought out or gone bankrupt. Those aren't relevant here. If a company offers a lifetime guarantee then it should honor that for the lifetime of the company. Google have chosen not to bother honoring the promise they made in the past, and they should be held to account for that.
If you run a business and you choose to make a lifetime offer you don't get to take that back just because you don't want to do it any more.
Tell that to Oregon Scientific, which cancelled the "lifetime" weather updates to my weather device.
Tell that Flightradar 24, which disabled the app I paid for, and the only way to get the functionality back is to download its new app and pay for a subscription. If it was disclosed at the time of purchase that I could be cut of at any time, I wouldn't have bought it.
Two stories. There are millions more on the internet.
I believe that XM radio did something similarly slimy to people who purchased a "lifetime" subscription when the service was starting up and it needed cash.
And didn't a bunch of people get their e-books deleted when Microsoft decided to shut down its e-book service? You think you're buying a lifetime of reading, only to find out you were just renting the books.
How anyone could give google a nickle at this point with their 0 customer support is beyond me.
The exception would be if somebody paid a "lifetime guarantee fee" initially to get that promise of service.
I imagine Google will not go further than giving a gift card to those users and call it a day.
> Basically if the company stops charging you, they don't owe you anything
No. If they refund the money you paid, or whatever they can convince a judge is the value of the lifetime guarantee (the difference between TYM and GPM prices forever, converted to Net Present Value), they don't owe you anything.
The only right thing to do is to refund all past customer payments, or refund the "value of the lifetime guarantee" (with treble damages for willfully violating the contract?), and add a "lifetime guarantee fee" in future contracts with clear wording to avoud the problem in the future.
A good example of this is the story of the small number of ticket American Airlines sold in the late 80s/early 90s which offered unlimited first-class air travel anywhere in the world for life.
They eventually had to resort buying them back from those customers for rather more than had originally been paid for the tickets.
Is it you, the customer? The offering company, or the 'lifetime of the offer' - which can be any number, as here.
Unless expressly stated, it’s the lifetime of the product or offering, not the buyer’s lifetime.
Buy a non-stick frying pan with a “lifetime” guarantee on the coating. 3 years.
But it is always a gamble, yes.