
Paid Cerberus 'lifetime' licenses are expiring - agluszak
https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/12/21/cerberus-paid-lifetime-license-expiration/
======
agluszak
Whether single-payment lifetime subscription (or what used to be called simply
"buying the app") can be a sustainable business model or not in 2019 is an
interesting topic.

But what I want to point out is that revoking something that was once promised
to users, ridiculous explanations that the company didn't expect their product
to last for so long, and finally deleting comments from their forum is a
shitty move that Cerberus should be shamed for. As well as everyone who tries
to do the same.

~~~
mitchtbaum
> But what I want to point out is that revoking something that was once
> promised to users [with] ridiculous explanations..

How do you back out of a bad promise made in good faith?

~~~
ljm
I don’t think that selling a ‘lifetime’ license is the same as offering
lifetime support and bug fixes. Your license would be for a version of the
software and I’d expect a year or two of support from that, just as the
standard guarantee consumers have when buying physical goods.

I don’t think it’d be that controversial to release a new version of the app
with a different pricing model while offering a fair upgrade path to existing
users. Only this version would be available on the App Store.

They can choose not to upgrade and the old app will still work just fine.
Keeping the servers up for that would be the cost of doing business.

This is more or less what 1Password have done. All their old versions are
still usable, you still have the license for an old version because you bought
it. Each upgrade is basically an entirely different release that you can
subscribe to or pay for.

Cerberus have fucked up by pulling the rug from underneath everyone and
revoking their licenses, making the software they bought unusable.

And as a word to the wise, maybe don’t think about making lifetime or ‘free
forever’ promises. They’re totally unrealistic.

~~~
quantum_magpie
1password operates on subscription model. From their support
([https://support.1password.com/frozen-
account/](https://support.1password.com/frozen-account/)):

 _You received this message because your 1Password subscription has lapsed.
While your account is frozen, you can still view all your items, copy your
passwords, and even copy items to vaults outside your account. But you won’t
be able to:

Add new items to vaults

Edit items

Invite people to your family or team

Fill items in your browser_

It becomes a read-only list of your passwords, instead of providing ongoing
service at a fixed version of the software (unlike JetBrains IDEs, where you
actually keep fully operational version of the IDE at the latest version you
qualified for).

~~~
iudqnolq
I think they're referring to the switch from a one time payment to a
subscription. Everyone who bought at the one-time price got to keep their
desktop application forever. You're apparently asking for a web application to
keep working after you stop paying, which I find different.

------
blfr
Expiring licenses, arbitrary limits, crippled functionality, troubles with
moving software between computers, publishers going under... this, much more
than money, is why I stick to free software as much as possible.

~~~
kjaftaedi
Maybe you mean open source? None of what you describe is limited to free
software.

If software is free, someone still has to sacrifice to keep it up to date. If
you're not paying money for it, publishers will get money in other ways like
advertisements, or selling your data.

Most apps cost less than the price of a single meal.

People that see value in something but refuse to pay even the tiniest amounts
will always be a cultural amazement to me.

~~~
jstanley
"“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community.
Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute,
study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of
liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as
in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre
software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to
show we do not mean the software is gratis. "

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
sw.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)

------
consp
Well, as they are selling in the EU, you can at least get you money back
(probably about (75/years you owned the app)*fee less but hey) if you bought
it there.

And then report them to your local consumer protection bureau for illegal
and/or deceptive practices depending on your country.

------
theaccordance
Lifetime licenses are the pyramid scheme of software sales; it’s not a
sustainable model and generally they’re offered for the lifetime of the
product, not the purchaser.

~~~
Grollicus
I get a piece of software, I get a license, you get some money, done. Why
should that not be sustainable? That model is working for over 30 years now.

~~~
hoistbypetard
Of course that's sustainable, if your license doesn't require me to run some
online infrastructure in order for it to continue to be useful.

In the case of the software in question on this thread, the software is
useless without the online service.

It's very hard to price a lifetime, one-time-fee license that requires ongoing
expenses to provide an online service, in such a way that providing the
service in perpetuity is sustainable.

And these people didn't.

~~~
rovr138
It’s doable. It’s just you need to know how to make it work. Also keep
improving so afterwards people not on those licenses keep buying and paying
for it.

Re lifetime licenses, if you offer it for a certain amount of time or until
you reach a goal. it can work. At that point, hey! You have funding and you
bootstrapped your product/company.

Then you switch to whatever licensing scheme you want.

~~~
hoistbypetard
I agree that it's doable, but "just ... know how to make it work" might be a
higher bar than it sounds like.

It would certainly appear these guys did not know how.

------
chimprich
This is pathetic behaviour by Cerberus. For a security product you really want
a trustworthy company to deal with.

I could maybe accept it if they gave their users plenty of notice, a
grovelling apology, and so on, but this seems like an exercise in how to most
quickly alienate your customers.

Can anyone recommend a good alternative to Cerberus with similar features?

~~~
chance_state
Are there features specific to Cerberus that you're looking for in another
product?

I switched to the standard Google Find My Device and I've heard the Apple one
is good too.

~~~
chimprich
Cerberus also allows you to do things such as set off an alarm on the phone,
take a photo using the camera, and a few other things. I don't think Google's
solution does all that. In addition, a quick test looks like using Google's
service triggers a notification on the device, which would cause anyone
stealing the device to turn the phone off.

I think Find My Device is mainly a solution to misplaced phones, with limited
use as an anti-theft tool.

------
techlaw
There are so many ways to handle software/service lifecycles but Cerberus'
apparent approach here is questionable from both a legal & business
perspective.

Not only is this possibly fraudulent/deceptive behavior* but given that their
particular service is predicated upon trust we think they should care more
about how untrustworthy this makes them appear.

Generally, why would we knowingly engage a seemingly untrustworthy company for
a trust-based service?

\--- * Although it is a "revocable license" the terms seem to only address
revocation due to "good faith belief" that a user has violated the T&Cs. How
to reconcile non-violation revocations of those who purchased a "lifetime"
license?

------
Causality1
I am one of these users. Aside from playing with the functionality a few times
after I bought the app in 2013, I've never used it but always recommended it
to friends and family. I'm willing to bet 90 percent of their users are like
me and cost them absolutely nothing while giving them free advertising.
Needless to say I won't be doing that anymore.

------
boyadjian
All these offers, "lifetime", "unlimited" are not sustainable. Everything has
a limit. I have a surveillance camera, I benefit freely from the cloud system
of the manufacturer to protect my house from burglars, by I know that some
day, it will end, and I will be forced to buy a new camera. I won't complain
about that.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
Just because a company makes bad business decisions doesn't make it OK to
screw over customers. Especially with something that costs them very little to
operate.

Many "lifetime licenses" are a gamble - you risk the product going away if the
company goes bankrupt, and you prepay a lot of money. Granted, here, it was
relatively cheap, but that doesn't make it OK to revoke it.

Especially since this seems to be a pure money-grab ("we know you already
paid, but how about paying a second time?"), not a "company can't afford the
burden of legacy customers given a good deal".

------
awill
I think it's obvious that lifetime subscriptions probably shouldn't exist if
the app requires a server side component. Unless the company treats this like
early investment and honours it.

What really annoys me is when a company converts an offline app to
subscription, like Ulysses. That was super annoying. At $40/y it's a complete
ripoff for just an offline note taking app.

It's also annoying when a company doesn't need a server-side component and
adds it anyway (like 1Password - possibly to justify the higher price or
subscription). I much prefer enpass which just uses your own Dropbox or Google
Drive.

------
dwheeler
When money is paid for something, then the service needs to be rendered or the
money returned. Everything else is fraud. If Cerberus doesn't like lifetime
licenses, they need to at least return the money paid for those licenses. I
suspect a court would agree.

------
Forge36
They did this 2 or 3 years back for the free lifetime license users on Amazon.
The feedback at the time was very similar to what I'm seeing here today. I
left the service in favor of the native Android solution from Google

------
awinder
This is not to take anything away from the level of pettiness from Cerberus in
the way they're handling it but there’s a couple of ways that this happens
with companies:

1\. Severe miscalculation where the costs of lifetime users become
significant. This speaks to a business problem, that you have dedicated users
but only at a skewed low cost.

2\. It becomes a political thing that new leaders can use to “make a
statement”. This happens when a lifetime tier doesn’t really cost anything at
the end of the day, but killing it sends internal messages about thriftiness
or just general statements that it’s a new day.

3\. Preceding a downsizing of a business that has fixed costs, like x number
of human beings need to support y number of users. Chasing away users to
reduce y so you can reduce x as well, and getting the lower paid users out is
where you want to bleed userbase.

All of that said — these are all functions of poorly conceived lifetime plans.
Lifetime plans where the rest of your model is based on monthly recurring
revenue should be treated for what they are, which is marketing. Don’t run
them for long periods of time, cap them at a reasonable number of users for
the spend, etc. And then if you screw that up, whatever you do as a
correction, don’t blame the users and be very upfront.

------
Frondo
So, this raises a question I've been wondering about. It seems like lifetime
licenses, i.e. one-time payments for a lifetime of access to upgrades, it
seems like there's been a number of cases where this backfires, either for the
company or the user.

I also dislike subscriptions, either paying for them or charging them, I'm a
traditionalist, pay for the software and you get point upgrades for free.

But my question is, is anyone doing this traditional model with web services?
Pay for access to a specific version of a web application, and you get that
for a lifetime (maybe with some small maintenance fee for upkeep)? But if you
want to upgrade to the v3 of the web application, that's a new fee?

Is anyone doing this? Is this workable? I might want to try it for my next
project but am wary of pitfalls.

~~~
ayushgp
I guess games are doing this or at least something similar with the DLC packs.
You buy the game once, keep paying for the new variants(?) and specials. And
you get bug fixes for these for free.

------
withdavidli
If users still have the credit card used to pay for the service, I would see
about issuing a charge back. Looks to be enough evidence of false
advertisement, specifically the emails that free lifetime users received.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
I highly doubt a bank will be happy with you trying to charge back a $3 charge
made years ago. Even if that wasn't done through an intermediary like an app
store that would screw you over for the chargeback.

~~~
withdavidli
Having dealt with chargebacks as a merchant and user, my experience is that
credit card companies will either issue the money back immediately unless
disputed by the merchant, and upon dispute it's up to the user to provide
proof of why the chargeback is warranted. And it looks like proof is easily
gotten with all the promises cited in the article.

As a user, issuing a chargeback was a last resort if merchant was giving me
the run around. Haven't issued a chargeback on a purchase years old, but have
done so on one from a travel/airline site about 3-6 months old.

~~~
unreal37
It was 8 years ago.

------
excerionsforte
Sure they could've communicated better/found better ways to raise money.
Someone needs to host the servers and if they aren't making enough to support
it then you (the consumer) lose the app's services. What is lifetime license
worth then?

They've probably spend enough of their own money supporting it already that it
came to this (Wish businesses were more transparent about it). Startups and
small companies are hard things to support with hard (sometimes unsavory)
decisions to make.

~~~
wirrbel
It's not a consumer's job to validate whether the license model of a company
is sustainable for the company.

IMHO courts should force the vendor to honor the contracts or as a compromise
refund the money payed initially when people bought the license

If the company goes bankrupt so be it, no one forced them to give out lifetime
licenses.

~~~
excerionsforte
If a business took away a free service (referring to the free lifetime users)
that they gave me a license for and said pay nominal amount. Go to court and
spend tons of time and money litigating or just pay the money? Think I'll pay
the money as I value my time. It is your choice. If there are other services
to switch to then this is the time to re-evaluate choice.

IANAL, but what would you go to court for? Deceptive practice? This is an app,
nothing important that caused me undue harm. Just find alternatives.

> If the company goes bankrupt so be it, no one forced them to give out
> lifetime licenses.

Seriously, you would rather an app you found useful to go bankrupt and forced
to find alternatives than to pay to support it and not find alternatives?
Sheesh.

~~~
MereInterest
Reframing a paid service (lifetime service, paid for up front) as a free
service is a marvelously deceptive description. Please tell me how you justify
making that description.

False advertising and breach of contract sound like the first reasonable
steps. Yes, it would be more time than it is worth for a single user. This is
exactly why class action lawsuits exist.

~~~
excerionsforte
I did not justify anything. Can you point out to me where I justified these
actions?

I expressed my preference to pay if I were in the same situation as it is not
worth my time. If it is something that causes me harm and/or disproportionate
burden then it is worth going to court.

~~~
MereInterest
You are the one who reframed a paid service as a free service. Rather than
calling it an outright lie, I am curious as to what reasoning led you to
believe that it is an accurate description.

~~~
excerionsforte
Reframing when my one comment referred to free lifetime users due to the first
few lines in the article.

> Four years after Cerberus made headlines when it invalidated free lifetime
> licenses, the device security app is back in the spotlight for the same
> questionable business practices.

I get it that you want to reframe my comment so you have something to bash at,
but the fact is I referred to a portion of the article. Not only did I say I
value my time, I made no value judgement on your beliefs or how you spend your
time. If something is not worth my time (harm/disproportionate burden), then I
will not pursue it and will look for alternatives. What is so unreasonable
about that? That I don't want to be negative as you said here? Not interested.

~~~
MereInterest
Ah, I see. You were mistaking Cerberus's actions of four years ago for their
actions today. Four years ago, they cancelled the free lifetime service. That
is allowed, as there was no exchange of value to form a contract. Now, they
cancelled the paid lifetime service. That is not allowed, as there was an
exchange of value.

~~~
excerionsforte
I did not mistake anything. I simply referred to an event that occurred and
people were angry about four years ago. It is more than acceptable to comment
on a specific portion of an article. I do not need to be angry, negative or
show outrage about what they are doing today. I do not use the app and have no
plans to.

I do believe that If I found myself in this situation I would be finding
alternatives and paying for a better provider than to be angry. Legal methods
are used only in the case of a substantial dispute as it is a time suck.

------
mrleinad
I noticed the email about a week ago, and couldn't understand why my
subscription was expiring. Didn't even remember it was a lifetime one, thought
there was something wrong and they were kicking me out and not charging the
annual fee.

I would look for alternatives, but since the fee is not unreasonable, I'll pay
for it. That said, the way they conduct business is shameful.

------
fencepost
I wonder how much of this is aftermath of them getting thrown out of the
Google Play app store in 2018.

~~~
procinct
I missed that. Why were they kicked off the play store?

~~~
fencepost
Sometime after the 11/2018 policy revamp that removed a lot of capabilities
around sms access, etc.

" _To give users an option to have a thorough protection, the Play Store app
displayed a message informing that the full-featured app could be installed as
an update from our official website. Apparently even that is not allowed by
Google, so they removed Anti-theft from the Play Store._ "

------
hardlianotion
Sounds like Cerberus does not deserve its customers.

------
jjuhl
Despicable. No other word for it.

------
techas
Airmail

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Quite frankly we did not think Cerberus would last that long!

Oh, I get it. When they said "lifetime license" they meant _Cerberus '_
lifetime, not the _user 's_ lifetime. They just somehow survived longer than
they thought they would.

/s

------
12xo
Another example of how advertising has perverted language to the point of it
having no almost meaning at all... Words used to actually mean something, but
no more. some examples: Unlimited, Free, Lifetime, Guaranteed, best, trust,
etc.etc.etc.etc.

Oh, and thanks to Trump, words like genius, fact and perfect, no longer have
any substantive meaning either... What a bizarre world we now live in...

------
edude03
I’m more surprised that people are upset. I got cerberus maybe 8 years ago for
a small sum of money (maybe $5) there is no way that’s sustainable. A service
like this should be no less than $10 a year.

That said I do think the developers aren’t communicating well, which is
leading to the upset customers. Seems like they should have said after some
point they would be changing to yearly billing.

~~~
msh
I would say it is a clear case of false advertising.

If it's bad business to honor their own promises that's the company's own
problem.

~~~
edude03
I agree it's false advertising, however often in these cases it becomes the
users problem because if it's not sustainable then the company might be forced
to go out of business which is likely worse than paying more for a product you
like and use.

------
theredbox
Free software was once necessary to balance out the astronomical costs of
enterprise software. But this is not the case anymore.

Free software is in this day and age not sustainable and using it it without
contributing a dime is parasitic and detrimental to the health of the sw
industry.

A lot of so called “free” software is alive and kicking strong because it is
funded by mega corporations doing it to kill the smaller competition.

In a sense using VS Code or VS Codium is just as bad as relying on an obscure
SAP module. We should all support small and medium sized SMEs like the
creators of Sublime Text.

~~~
jmiserez
> _Free software is in this day and age not sustainable and using it it
> without contributing a dime is parasitic and detrimental to the health of
> the sw industry._

That is completely untrue. Merely using free software has no negative effect
on it's continued development.

Even filing issues and bug reports are contributions if they are of high
enough quality. And in fact, many projects allow you to buy support or new
features for money.

> _funded by mega corporations doing it to kill the smaller competition._

That's also untrue. Companies profit in a myriad of ways by providing their
software as free software.

 _EDIT: to the flagged reply below:_

\- OpenJDK is currently funded by Oracle

\- start with these: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-
sourc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-
source_software) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-
source_economics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_economics)

~~~
papermachete
Not good enough. I want to make money with my apps. I support the idea of
shipping the source upon purchase only.

~~~
rovr138
Welcome to open source.

That’s a perfectly valid business model for open source software and there are
people and companies using it.

~~~
papermachete
I believe it's against GPL to hide the source like that.

