Basic (costing 50 of your earth currency units per annum)
Premium (cost 75 pa)
Gold (cost 150 pa)
You’re on the Basic tier and you’re happy about that, but you receive a message that says: ‘due to the ongoing running costs of our services, in a changing financial world, we have to increase the price of Basic to 75; this will be reflected in your next annual bill, but don’t feel down - we are going to make the product better by bundling in some sweet features you did not have before in your Basic plan’
You shrug and accept this (it seems there is nothing much else you could do), however, you find that the new feature that you have been given is random popup windows playing a video of a screaming goat. You hate it, because you value your sanity.
You search for solutions to this problem and discover that there is a hidden product tier that is available, but not listed in the pricing page on the supplier’s site, but that hidden tier ‘Basic Goat-Free’ sounds like the thing you wanted all along.
After a two hour call with technical support and sales, during which they try to persuade you of the many benefits of random screaming goat video popups, they capitulate and allow you to downgrade to ‘Basic Goat-Free’. It’s only then that you realise this is the plan you were on before the price hike, so the pricing structure is now:
Basic Goat-Free (cost 50pa) - this option is not offered on the menu - you have to ask for it
Basic (cost 75 pa)
Gold (cost 150 pa)
So nothing had really changed, except the names of the tier options, and they used this to obfuscate the fact that they moved you onto the higher-priced ‘Premium’ tier.
Does this sound like it should be illegal? I feel like that.
BTW this isn’t a pure hypothetical; this is exactly what Microsoft did with Office 365 - they hiked the price for ‘Personal’ and ‘Family’ subscriptions, but in fact that was a surreptitious upgrade to a tier that included Copilot and access to some additional cloud storage subscription choices. However, if you look very hard and spend a couple of hours penetrating the sales spiel in Live Chat, you can ‘downgrade’ to ‘Personal Classic’ or ‘Family Classic’, which turns out to be the same cost and feature set - the exact same product - as you had before the price change; only the name has changed.
They’re a business. They’ve got the right to decide what products they want to offer, and at what price. But the underlying principle behind the whole free market is that the consumer is reasonably well informed about what that offer is. The honest and pro-market thing to do is to say, “In this changing world, we’ve adjusted our offer - here are all the subscription tiers we offer, their costs and features, take this time to decide which you prefer.”
Not telling you about the continued basic option amounts to obtaining money by deception.
It raises another question; if their strategy is so clearly to migrate people to higher-cost screaming goat subscriptions, then why retain the goat-free version at all? I mean yes, they’ve made it as hard to find and buy as they can, but it’s still there. But crafting the chat options to make it inaccessible is a lot more work than just removing it. So, why not just do that?
Can’t help but feel that the answer to that question is: they’re not allowed to. I’m guessing, but I wouldn’t be totally surprised if in fact they can’t just switch you to a different, more expensive product without technically giving you an option not to. That would make sense as a basic consumer protection - it would be kind of mad if you could sign up to a service at a price and then be told n months later that no, it’s actually a different service at a different price, nothing you can do about it.
So I suspect that there is a legal line they can’t cross with respect to chaning subscription deals, and they are very carefully walking right up to it.
Also, this seems to be a basic risk with software as a service. When it was a product, you bought it, you owned it. You might choose to upgrade at some point, and probably would when they released a new product that had features you wanted, but that decision was very much in your hands. Now, you don’t own it, you own a right to access some version of it, which is a very different thing.
Sure, I think if it were as simple as “sorry, we’re putting the price up, but we think the product is worth it now” - whilst that maybe sucks, it’s fairly straightforward - if you like the product/service, pay the new price; if you don’t, then shop around or whatever.
But this wasn’t that - this was ‘we think you should upgrade to our more expensive offering, so we did that for you’
Yeah, under this model power has shifted considerably towards the seller. It used to be the risk of launching a new product was that, basically, no one would want it. This risk could be mitigated by research, careful development, listening to customers etc. but it was always there. Now it seems the mitigation strategy is: just force it on people.
This isn’t new - Microsoft/Internet Explorer comes to mind - but so much easier now. It’s exactly the sort of anti-consumer behaviour that needs regulation to ensure a free market.
SaaS paved the way, but the underlying mindset is now progressively infecting many, many other consumer sectors beyond software. The best known is in the area of media streaming, where you no longer buy movies or albums, you buy an open-ended usage license which can be terminated with little or no warning for any of a dozen annoying reasons.
The most egregiously obnoxious new-ish development, in my view, is in the automotive sector, where the manufacturer will sell you a vehicle that is functionally fully-loaded but whose baseline purchase price covers only basic driveability. More advanced features are locked behind a monthly subscription paywall — the car can do the thing, but the thing doesn’t work unless you pony up.
The whole push toward reaming people on increasingly onerous mandatory subscriptions is going to get a lot worse until everyone gets fed up and elects governments on the promise to put real teeth into their consumer-protection functions.
Yes, and the thing these have in common is that they are all very much in the interests of the producer/vendor, not the end user. Not just for legitimate reasons (like only having to produce one model of each car) but because it pushes the customer into a position where they can only exert control over the product they are paying for by doing battle with carefully engineered “customer support” systems designed to make life so difficult you pay more than you’d like for something you don’t want simply because its exhausting and aggravating to do anything else.
This is the entire Adobe and PTC business models minus their additional twist of, “We’re ending support of this popular package that you’ve been using for eight years but we think you’ll be very happy with this new product at 1.5X the cost but lacking essential features that you frequently use which can only be had by selecting a higher tier which also comes with our shitty cloud storage that doesn’t suit your needs and an AI agent that will second guess every decision you make.” And if you try to opt out and just get the basic features you need, you get Henry Hill saying “Fuck you, pay me!” because what are you going to do, migrate your entire library of documents or CAD data to a new format?
Did you get the talk about how your new (more expensive) subscription includes ‘free AI credits’?
I only ever used one of my AI credits, which was asking Copilot to write detailed instructions for turning off Copilot. It produced a very lucid guide on how to adjust settings and options that simply don’t exist. We can hallucinate it for you, wholesale.
SaaS or shrink-wrap product, the OP’s real problem is lock-in. It’s difficult to and costly to switch away from e.g. Office because of your investment in knowledge and skill using it, and the vast amount of work product you’ve created using it.
Yes, the competing world is better now than in e.g. 1990 about being able to ingest other brands’ files But it’s still not universal and seamless. And for anyone who really uses the features of these very fully featured products, the learning curve for another brand’s e.g. stylesheets or pivot tables, might be a hefty burden.
IMO that is the thing that gives them the ultimatum power to say “Here’s the new deal; like it or lump it, but pay up.”, confident that most customers will grumble and pay up.
The one way that SaaS does grant the vendor power over shrink-wrap is that you can, if you really really want, still be running a retail copy of Office 2003 here 22 years later for the one-time price you paid for it. Then again, when e.g. Office 365 was introduced, the family plan was a 5-seat license that cost IIRC about 20% of what a retail single-PC shrink-wrap version cost. So you could buy 25 person-years of SaaS license for the price of one shrink-wrap license that you could use as long as your technological ingenuity could keep it running.
Indeed. The automotive example I mentioned above is actually sort of ingenious in how it magicks up a new revenue stream out of nothing. Not really on the initial purchase; supposedly the buyer feels extra incentive due to the discounted bottom-line price for the car without features enabled, and then the subscription makes up the difference. But on resale of the used car, the next buyer has the option to re-customize the car’s configuration by identifying himself or herself as the new owner, and subscribe to activate desired features accordingly. In the old world, the carmaker sees zero income in the secondary market. But now? Monthly fees from everyone, baby!
So sure should be. But it sounds like it isn’t. Didn’t this happen with some Windows upgrade before too?
But IANAL and I’d love to hear from one of our legal minds about when presumed consent subscription upgrades are not allowed. Because it sound like as long as they tell you they are changing your price and/or services they can do whatever they want. Do they at least need to allow you to cancel?
Yeah, you can cancel, and maybe there’s almost certainly some bit in the small print somewhere that says they can hike the subscription price mid term, but I think what they did here was unethical simply because it wasn’t a price increase - it was an unsolicited upgrade (when the existing offering is still available).
Spotify did something similar not too long ago. Raised the price of their plans but now you get X many hours of audio books per month. Not announced was that you could revert to a “Sans Audio book” plan and take the additional charge off. This was only available to people who were subscribers when it happened and, if you cancel, you won’t be able to access that plan again.
That is not an option where you need professional grade engineering CAD systems capable of handling large assemblies and product data management, have to interoperate with vendors or clients using proprietary formats, or files using proprietary data features.
Not a lawyer but I’ve read plenty of end user license agreements (EULAs) and actually done a lot of research on open source licenses such as the GNU General License, BSD Licenses, and the MIT License. Commercial EULAs are often quite permissive for the issuer, permitting them to alter, restrict, or eliminate features or change their subscription structure without notice, and not requiring them to maintain continuity with or support for previous versions while placing substantial restrictions upon the end user regarding their use of software outside the scope of what is provided including any third party extensions or trying to maintain interoperability with other software or formats. In terms of prices, you are basically locked into whatever contract or purchase order agreement but nothing stops a company from jacking up the price upon renewal or with appropriate notice except market competition.
One other thing about this… If they had just included the option to make Copilot shut the hell up, I probably would never have questioned the price hike.
And they could do that, because after the ‘downgrade’ I had to uninstall and re-download and reinstall Office to make it work properly again, and when I first opened one of the apps, Copilot was there, momentarily, on the ribbon, then it vanished, so it’s clear the only difference is configuration - it’s just configuration they won’t let the user adjust.
I play this game with Comcast/Infinity internet and SiriusXM every year. The renewal rate is much higher because they’ve done me a favor and upgraded my plan “for free” during the previous year. I tell them I’m on a fixed income, can’t afford it, and will have to cancel. Voila, they figure out a way to keep my rate, and the dance is over until next year.