[colordrops]

What should they do instead? spend money continuously holding your music on disk forever even though you aren't paying them for the service? Sounds like they are being cool about it by keeping it around for a while and warning you before deleting it.

[goblin89]

The marketing move of offering an unlimited plan reveals that storage and traffic are not that expensive and someone made a choice that light users will subsidize heavy users. With that, hiding your data from you and subsequently deleting it, at least without first encouraging you to download it within some post-downgrade grace period, would be a choice, not necessity, and is user-hostile.

If it is an actual necessity—a service chose to market an unlimited plan to attract more users, and then realized they are losing money on storage and traffic so much that they would unapologetically burn bridges with existing users who showed themselves as willing to pay (who maybe needed to downgrade temporarily for whatever reason) with the above move—and yet their strategy is apparently to keep offering that plan (in hopes to turn things around with more light users joining?), I would question whether that service has serious issues with even medium term planning.

[direwolf20]

No matter their actual costs to provide the service, I'm struggling to see why they should not immediately delete all of your stored files upon cancellation of the storage service.

They are a European company, so you are the customer, not the product and recipient of subsidies. They use less manipulation and dark patterns than an equivalent American company.

You pay, you get service. You don't pay, you don't get service. If they can't bill you, they should try to communicate with you for a few months before treating it as a cancellation. If you cancel, then your choice is clear and you should expect your service to be immediately terminated at the end of the current billing period. If their service is storing files for you, termination of the service means deletion of the files.

There is no need for a grace period when you knowingly and voluntarily make the decision to terminate a file storage service.

[goblin89]

> you are the customer, not the product and recipient of subsidies

They also do advertisement (promoted tracks and audio ads) but this is irrelevant to my point, what I described applies regardless, including the fact that heavy users of the unlimited plan and free users definitely receive subsidies, both from light users and from ad revenue of the platform.

> You pay, you get service. You don't pay, you don't get service

The definition of the service you receive and how good it is includes what happens when you decide to off-ramp from receiving it. Changing your service plan is your indication that you want to change service, what happens after that is how they handle it. There is no stipulation whatsoever that things stop being available to you immediately.

In fact, in case of SoundCloud, they themselves prove this, because they did not delete data but instead continued to keep data for free, which means providing you a service that you presumably stopped paying for. The silly move of them was to do that and not allow you to download it, and then emailing the victim urging them to pay to access this data, which makes it 100% a dark pattern and means they are effectively blackmailing customers with proven ability and willingness to pay.

If I remember right, Apple (an American company) handles it better and gives you a month to download excess data if you downgrade, but sure, “dark patterns”.

> There is no need for a grace period when you knowingly and voluntarily make the decision to terminate a file storage service.

If you terminate your use of a file storage service, you would expect your personal data to be deleted. However, no one terminated their use of a service, somebody apparently downgraded their payment plan (temporarily or not).

[direwolf20]

Sounds like they will warn you about your storage limit for a while, so you can choose which data to delete to be under the limit, before deleting your data at random to force you under the limit. Quite reasonable.

[goblin89]

You mean Apple? I don’t think they actually delete any minor excess data that may occur incidentally due to race condition or eventual consistency. Just if you actually downgrade, they do… After a month or so, during which you can still download.

[dzhiurgis]

As a listener I'd pay (a reasonable amount like <$5 per month) to only listen to mixes, especially if it can be filtered by bitrate.

Their best feature is social feed - I only see reposts from people I follow. But for branching out / discovery might be cool to see what their feed looks like, so something like "show followees feed".

[throwaway431234]

Overall what Im saying is they treat their non-paying customers better then their paying ones. Once I was a paying customer after having and using my free account for over 7 years then converting to a paying customer and having to cancel Soundcloud became hostile.

[direwolf20]

Did you have more stored data than the limit for stored data for unpaid accounts?