Last week we posted an update about the downgrades for accounts on the 20/30/50/60 GB plans. We received a lot of feedback regarding these changes on Reddit and through support tickets so we’d like to address the comments and concerns people had.
Lifetime Offers
First off, we’re not liars! How dare you call us that?! The term we prefer to use is “mind-changers”. And we’re back today because we changed our mind again. We are revising the downgrades that were originally announced.
Let’s talk about the biggest issue people had - the 50/60 GB plans were advertised as Lifetime deals. We’re going to be entirely honest here, when we first planned for these downgrades, no one internally had remembered the fact that these were ever claimed to be lifetime upgrades since, like mentioned before, these were claims we made over half a decade ago in a handful of Reddit comments. Then, after we started the downgrades, some people pointed out those few instances where we said they were lifetime. And after the last Reddit post we made to clear up the confusion, we got even more screenshots and examples where these codes were advertised as lifetime. Whether it was someone on our team saying it ages ago, or some coupon website or forum saying you get the upgrades forever, this is how it was advertised to people.
However, we never specified whose lifetime the upgrades are valid for. Was it the lifetime of the universe? The lifetime of a fruit fly? Your own lifetime? Well we don’t track the vitals of our users (or fruit flies) so we reckon this should be clarified once and for all. After some lengthy deliberation and seeing all the examples of the lifetime claims, we decided it was only fair to revert this change and honor the lifetime nature of this plan……for the duration of Vladimir Putin’s lifetime. That’s right, we’re pinning the expiry date for the lifetime Free upgrades to the expiry date of Putin.
So, if you currently have the 50GB or 60GB plan, or if you had it but got caught in the first wave of downgrades, you will get to keep it until Vladimir Putin has passed away.
An Offer You Can’t Refuse
Some of you also pointed out that the cheap deal we offered in exchange for getting downgraded from the early 50/60 GB plans was not as significant as you’d have liked. Many of you have been around for a long time, supporting us for years and while it is the cheapest plan we offer at $29/year for Pro, this price point does come around from time to time during other promotions.
We did a bit of thinking and agreed that this needed to change. You guys are the early adopters of our service and you deserve better than a promo you can get alongside everyone else during a holiday. You were here since the baby Windscribe days, back when we had caveman apps and were working out of a household office.
So we’d like to make a new, one-time ultimate offer, special just for those of you on the early 50/60 GB plans and no one else. For a limited time only, we have made the absolute lowest priced plan that we’ve ever had - $10 for a Yearly Pro Subscription… BUT… it has one condition - you have to give up your 50/60 GB plan to get this deal.
You pick one or the other. Guarantee yourself an exceptionally cheap Pro subscription now and never get 50/60 GB again on your account, or take a gamble on how long Putin will live and keep the 50/60 GB plan until his demise. This $10/year offer will expire on September 1st, 2023. After that, you are going the Putin Lifetime route and keeping the 50/60 GB plan. You wanted a deal? This is the best it will ever get. We’ve never gone this cheap before, and we’ll never go this cheap again. If you’re on the 50/60 GB plan and want this deal, click this link, log in on our website and you will see that glorious $0.83 per month (billed annually) price.
Now, we know that this won’t make everyone happy and we understand that, however we still need to be looking at the bigger picture as a business. Windscribe is still growing, we’re still hiring more people to make our service even better for everyone. For every new feature you see, every bug that gets reported, every server that goes down, there are people behind the scenes working hard on those things to make sure that the impact to users is minimized while the benefits you get are the best in the industry. But we want to be even better - more features, faster bug fixes, less server downtime, and while we’d love to offload all this to a few ChatGPT prompts to take care of, we unfortunately still need humans around to do a lot of the heavy lifting.
Relief Codes
While the early 50/60GB codes were in fact advertised as lifetime codes, the relief codes we sent out during hard times in certain regions were not. Because they weren’t intended to be permanent and due to the massive abuse we saw with these codes, we are still going forward with the downgrades for anyone who had them. We’ll have future relief codes as well but these will be temporary and will automatically get removed after some time. Anyone downgraded from a relief code will still be able to claim the existing discount and get a Pro subscription for $29/year.
Broken Trust
Many people also mentioned how these changes were trust-breaking because if we were willing to go back on our word when it comes to these offers, what else would we go back on? Are Lifetime Pro accounts at risk? Will we randomly remove functionality from the standard Pro plans? What if we start selling user data? How far will these changes go?!
Let’s take a deep breath here and stop panicking. At no point were any of these other things even discussed internally. Reducing the amount of free things we give away is an exceptionally far cry from killing all user trust, and in essence our company, by selling user data for a few extra bucks. This company is built upon the pillars of user privacy, that has been our mission since the start and will continue to be going forward. As for the other concerns, Lifetime Pro is unaffected by these changes as mentioned in the previous post, and normal Pro plans continue to be normal Pro plans with no changes to them.
We understand the value of your trust and how important it is in this business, and it’s clear that our decision to downgrade users and parts of our communication about it has led some people to question that trust. Rest assured though that we’re not turning evil, this wasn’t step 1 of some diabolical plan for us to squeeze profits out of every nook and cranny we can at the expense of all our users. This decision was scoped entirely to the upgraded Free plans.
After our initial updates about this, we listened to all the user feedback we got from tickets, Reddit comments and other social media and spent a long time discussing these changes internally. We stand by the reasons that we provided here and in the previous post regarding abuse of these accounts and changes in revenue models, but we also see that our decision to go through these downgrades was a bit short-sighted and unfair. Ultimately, we landed on a decision somewhere in the middle. You get to keep the 50/60 GB plans for the rest of Putin’s lifetime - it could be 1 year or it could be 20 years - or if you want to break free from the shackles of the Free plan, you get an opportunity to do so at the absolute cheapest price we’ve ever had or will ever have.
Thank you to all the people that were understanding about these changes and accepted the reasons for making them, we genuinely appreciate your support through thick and thin. And also thank you to everyone who spoke out about the changes and voiced their concerns as well. Windscribe prides itself on the community we’ve built over the years and we’re grateful to be able to have these sorts of discussions with the users, something that many other companies don’t have the luxury of doing.
