VPN service cancels customers' lifetime subscriptions after takeover, says new owners didn't know they existed

midian182

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Staff member
WTF?! When you see an advertisement for a "lifetime" subscription to something, always remember that it rarely means your lifetime. Those who took out lifetime subscriptions to VPNSecure discovered this when the company was taken over by new owners who promptly canceled the subs. Their excuse? They didn't know some customers had them.

In an email posted on Reddit from "The VPN Secure Team" sent to lifetime subscription holders, it's explained that VPNSecure was acquired in 2023. The deal included the technology, domain, and customer database, but not the liabilities.

"Unfortunately, the previous owner did not disclose that thousands of Lifetime Deals (LTDs) had been sold through platforms like StackSocial," reads the mail.

"We discovered this only months later – when a large portion of our resources were strained by these LTD accounts and high support volume from users, who through part of the database, provided no sustaining income to help us improve and maintain the service."

As a result of this, the new owners began deactivating lifetime accounts that had been dormant for six months. While it's claimed that this was "technically fair," – for some reason – the new owners seem shocked that it led to a wave of negative reviews.

After a section in which the email highlights an alleged message from a customer who notes that Geni.com's lifetime subs were converted to 5-year subscriptions after its acquisition, the new owners have decided to do the same – except they'll be offering a maximum of three years and charging a discounted rate.

VPN Secure deactivated all Lifetime Deal accounts
byu/luckyuglydawg invpns

All VPNSecure Lifetime Deal accounts were deactivated as of April 28, 2025. Those who were on the plan can grab a new subscription for either $1.87 for a month (usually $9.95), $19 for a year (usually $79.92), or $55 for three years (usually $107.64). They have until May 31 to take advantage of these offers, after which time they will have to pay the same as everyone else.

Ars Technica reports that a follow-up email from VPNSecure shed more light on the situation. It states that InfiniteQuant Ltd, which is a different company than InfiniteQuant Capital Ltd, acquired VPN Secure in an "asset only deal."

It goes on to say that while the buyers received the tech, brand, infrastructure, and tech, they received none of the company, contracts, payments, or obligations from the previous owners.

It's also claimed the Lifetime Deals sold by the old team between 2015 and 2017 were not disclosed to InfiniteQuant Ltd, but it kept the accounts running for 2 extra years despite never receiving a "single cent from those subscriptions." So stop being ungrateful, basically.

The final part of the message claims that anyone who didn't see the original message explaining all this must have it in their spam folder or simply missed it completely.

The new owners said they didn't sue the seller over withholding the information on lifetime subs because "a corporate lawsuit would've cost more than the entire purchase of the business." The email also states that the buyers could have simply shut down VPNSecure but instead "chose the hard path."

While it's claimed the lifetime subscriptions were sold between 2015 and 2017, typing "VPNSecure lifetime subscriptions" into Google Search shows a 2021 ad on ZDNet for this $40 plan. An ad for a $28 lifetime subscription also ran on the site in 2022.

Lifetime subscriptions are rarely actual lifetimes. VPNSecure's plans lasted up to 20 years, according to online comments. There's always the chance new owners of companies won't honor the contracts either. Whether InfiniteQuant Ltd really didn't know about the subscriptions can't be confirmed, but it's led to a Trustpilot score of 1.2 for the VPN and pages of angry comments.

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A lifetime VPN will not uphold; unless your intention is to grow a user base and then spin the whole thing off in exchange for a load of cash. I bet there's suddenly new VPN services popping up with another life time subscription. Servers, data, support all that costs money. You cant cover that for years for a 10$ subscription.
 
Same thing happened to me with Cakewalk Sonar, they offer lifetime software updates for a onetime fee I paid it and then a year later they announced the Sonar would no longer be in active development and that they were decommissioning their software activation servers.

When I bought the lifetime upgrade (@ $800) I knew the offer sounded too good I never thought they would take our money and then say they were not going to develop the software anymore 1 year later.
 
This is obviously illegal, you can't ignore the law by claiming ignorance.
Second half is usually true. First half may be more complicated than you make it out to be. If there is a crime here, who is the perpetrator? To the extent the lifetime holders have a claim, it may be against the old business owner (seller), not the new owner (buyer.) If the sale of assets happened through a bankruptcy proceeding, the claims resolution process is complicated and subject to strict time windows. If the sale was voluntary, you might need an expert on the jurisdiction(s) in question (not identified in the article) to know to what extent the business assets and liabilities could be separated in the sale.
 
Second half is usually true. First half may be more complicated than you make it out to be. If there is a crime here, who is the perpetrator? To the extent the lifetime holders have a claim, it may be against the old business owner (seller), not the new owner (buyer.) If the sale of assets happened through a bankruptcy proceeding, the claims resolution process is complicated and subject to strict time windows. If the sale was voluntary, you might need an expert on the jurisdiction(s) in question (not identified in the article) to know to what extent the business assets and liabilities could be separated in the sale.

The claim of ignorance suggests either poor due diligence by them or incomplete disclosure by the seller. Without details on the acquisition contract, we can’t say definitively, but nondisclosure could make the original owner partially liable.

The new owners are the ones who deactivated lifetime accounts, and their email admitting a “poor experience” shows they knew it was mishandled. By taking over VPNSecure (the business entity), they likely inherited customer contracts, including lifetime subscriptions, unless the acquisition explicitly excluded them. Canceling these without notice or legal justification could breach those contracts, making them the primary culprits in this case.

VPNSecure, as a legal entity (likely a corporation or LLC), holds the contracts with lifetime subscribers. When the new owners acquired the business, they stepped into the entity’s shoes, inheriting its obligations unless the sale was structured to avoid them. They are at a dead end.
 
Thousands of customers? Need a precise number and how many did not. Could the new owner, VPN Secure, have carried the cost in any case but out of principle or decided to just try it on and see what the fallout would be? Why did VPNSecure sell?
 
I had a temptation to buy a lifetime cloud storage a few times. It would fit my needs much better than paying monthly for somethign I do not even need that much.
But I held myself from doing it. I am fairly sure half of those services will never become profitable.
And there is no way they can compete with Google or MS. So, their end will be quick and sad for lifetime subscribers.
In a world where every business owner dreams of selling subscriptions, buying a lifetime service
sounds like a very funny joke.
 
Lifetime is a bad joke and it nearly never works. Corporations simply can't stand people using something not paying for it constantly, and 'ownership' is worse than swearing. I highly recommend watching this thing to see how we are getting scr****d by them and how to try to avoid it:

 
While some lifetime subscriptions don't work I have a lifetime subscription on getting scr3wed over for which I did not even sign up. It's been going strong for a véry long time now. :-D
 
I'm one of the many cancelled lifetime customers. No notice cancellation, it just stopped working. Now I'm inundated with "special" offers that are not so special. They have lost me for a lifetime and I have found much better options. Recommend you look elsewhere if you are considering this failed company.
 
Server costs money. the cost only goes up every year.

in 2011 I paid 10$ for 10-year plan for Whatsapp. yes for you younger kids you read that right, whatsapp used to charge $1 for usage back then. at the time there wasn't even video call and you can't even send video files. development was slow, it took many years before whatsapp even came to android.

now you have many things, including group video calls. group chats, business features and so on. yet we all paid $0 for the current whatsapp. in fact I don't mind paying $1 a month for whatsapp now that people around the world rely on it so much. but so far it doesn't cost anything, because apparently my data is worth more to them.

hence you need to be wary of online services offering lifetime deal (because server cost goes up every year) but then you also need to be wary of online services that are free to use because they are likely too good to be true.

remember the google pixel unlimited backup feature? the OG pixel truly has unlimited original quality photo backup. google realized how much it costs so Pixel 2-5 only has unlimited compressed quality backup. pixel 6 onwards? you gotta pay up.
 
Server costs money. the cost only goes up every year.

I don't agree. If you buy a server today it's 100x more efficient then 10 years ago. The only thing that could drive costs up is electra, licencing costs and people to maintain those things.

But it's perfectly possible to year in year out cut on costs since you can put an automation to pretty much everything.
 
So basically, the word "lifetime" here does NOT mean lifetime, right?
Sounds a LOT like a scam. Just sayin'...
If you're going to sell a "lifetime" product that can be cancelled at any point, you should at least make sure customers are informed about the fact... that it is not a lifetime subscription! More like "long term" subscription, or "extended".
 
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