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by alenlpeacock 4545 days ago
We haven't backpedalled on anything. The original rewards offered on Kickstarter stand. We will honor all backer rewards as originally offered.

We simply believe that the offering we are now giving to new customers is better in most ways than the one we gave to Kickstarter backers, so we wanted to let them in on the sweet action too, at their choice.

And to say thanks for backing us early, we threw in an extra 6 months of service ($60 value under their current plan), free, if they took us up on the offer.

We thought we were being cool about this, and the vast majority of our Kickstarter backers do think we are being cool about it, voting in support of this offer with their very real dollars by upgrading.

Those who are upset by this offer are very few in number, and we've offered refunds to all of them.

What else do you think we should do?

1 comments

Not mentioning on the campaign that the device is a lease, rental, etc., and now saying it is, to me, is backpedalling. Add to that the fact that SpaceMonkey never mentioned the cost of the plan post-1 year during the entire campaign, and months after. From the outside that comes across as if the entire cost structure was to be determined, and it sure seems to me that that was the case.
The very first sentence of the Kickstarter page says, "Space Monkey is the next generation cloud. For $10 per month, you get a full Terabyte (1000 Gigabytes) of storage you can use anywhere, any time."
I know the Space Monkey guys from working together at Mozy and I can vouch that they wouldn't be deliberately misleading about this.
Yes but that doesn't clear up the ownership vs lease issue.

Your argument is that the lease is implied, @emil10001's is that ownership is implied - I can read the page both ways.

The whole problem seems to stem from the lack of an explicit statement on this - perhaps it should have been in the FAQs?

Having a $/month service on top of hardware does not change the nature of ownership. Mixing hardware and network seems to be a constant with SpaceMonkey's communication strategy. I'm sure that a law student could show how none of the KS campaign qualifies as a rental/lease offer.