I mean, that's all fine and well. Just don't sell products then take them away after because you can. Imagine buying physical goods and having the business owner come to your house and take it away because it was costing them too much. Insanity.
So should they be obligated to keep supporting their servers forever?
The better analogy would be like me expecting NordicTrack to service my exercise equipment for free forever. They aren’t going to take my physical equipment away. But they also aren’t going to keep sending me replacement parts and service techs out anytime I call them unless I keep paying the annual warranty.
And before anyone replies that it must be shoddy equipment to keep needing repairs, heavily used exercise equipment constantly has moving parts that wear down.
I think you're missing my point. I don't mind that they switched to a subscription service, I fucking hate being lied to. Given that they eventually came around to grandfathering the purchasers (who I guess had to go click a button somewhere), they obviously knew they were wrong on that front.
Don't sell products then change them afterwards. I paid for a thing. Then they made it so that the thing I purchased required more payment indefinitely. That's bullshit.
Part of their marketing was “No subscription fees” and the premium was marketed as “lifetime”.
It was a pretty big bait-and-switch and the r/PocketCasts is a good example of bad customer relations.