Except the one thing that doesn't get cheaper is the human power needed to administer the stuff and deal with the people. And as Joyent moves away from that sort of thing it becomes an unusual task and a drain on core business.
Which doesn't mean I think this is okay; the smart thing would have been to hand all of us lifetimers a lifetime bottom-tier slice. But I see why they'd want to be out of shared hosting.
Lifetime typically means expected life of the product (see: lifetime warranties). Death is really, really complicated, so I can't imagine anybody would actually tie their products to a consumer's death.
It has this Q&A item: How long is it good for? As long as we exist.
The footer states: a Joyent company
Nothing complicated, Joyent still exists. shrug
What was worse was that Joyent changed directions, decided its then current customers weren't profitable enough (my guess shared hosting = higher per head tech support costs) and basically stagnated the service while it introduced new services. I think they did this a couple of times, and it has always made me relunctant to recommend them to friends (even ones looking for cloud services).
Sigh I hope StrongSpace will still honour the lifetime part.
BTW for readers who think lifetime account holders are being greedy, the point of the accounts was that when TextDrive/Joyent needed extra capital to expand, they offered lifetime accounts in return for quite a bit of cash up front. In part, they are where they are due to this clever bit of fund raising.