Serious Discussion Windscribe reneged on my free account

[codswollip]

When Windscribe was a flegling service here several years ago, they were generous with the lifetime offers which were used to gain publicity and jumpstart the service.

By happenstance I qualified for a free lifetime accout capped at 50 GB. While a nice feature, I rarely ran up to the cap.

Recently I was notified that my lifetime account would be demoted from 50 GB monthly to their standard 10 GB monthly cap. Quite the low-handed and disingenuous path...

I post this as caution to others, whether you have the free 50 GB monthly account, or purchased an "unlimited" lifetime account. Be wary of Windscribe. They are no longer the user focused service that Windscribe was founded upon. Hints of these changes came not so long ago when it was revealed that Windscribe encrpytion was not as robust as a VPN service required. Although we were "assured" issues were resolved, acts like revoking a promotional lifetime free account, point to cost mitigation as a top concern. Good luck to all!

NordVPN, AirVPN, and Mullvad VPN remain the top 3 services for user protection.

 

[I Walk MY Way]

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch anymore, This is not the first time I've heard of such under handed tactics Used by Windscribe buy a good VPN And move on, Complaining to Windscribe Get you anywhere Windscribe Customer Service Is Not good, And they have a less than stellar reputation So spend $ And don't bother With windscribe Any more.

 

[Digmor Crusher]

Yup, just checked, they are going to downgrade me too, I've had zero issues with them but just sent a nasty email. Maybe try Proton.

 

[plat]

I'm not seeing any obvious stuff in its EULA but maybe you have to "read in between the lines." The "warranties" section maybe?

Windscribe

Your online privacy is under attack. Windscribe sets you free.

windscribe.com

 

[blackice]

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch anymore

There never was. A lifetime subscription service is a completely unsustainable business model.

 

[ForgottenSeer 100397]

Windscribe's move on the free-lifetime accounts is not an issue for me. People accumulated free-lifetime accounts. I have confidence in Windscribe as a VPN service, and I am sure they will respect paid-lifetime accounts. The promotional sale of limited lifetime subscriptions led to Windscribe's growth and popularity.

 

[spaceoctopus]

This is called marketing.If you buy into it, just to bad. It happened to me too, but with other companies and products giving you the possibility to buy some so called "Lifetime" access to their service.
You just have to be realistic, a company will change in the course of time, new products will appear on the market, others will be removed and so on.It's a popular "trap" to increase revenue in all kinds of businesses.

About Windscribe, it is a decent product, with fast servers and very good DNS filtering.

 

[Trident]

Many of the lifetime offers on Stacksocial turned out not to be honoured. From backup/cloud storage that was closing accounts due to “illegal materials stored” (Degoo) to antivirus that later on was converted to a business-only brand (Cylance) to a VPN that became totally free (Ivacy).

These subscriptions should be avoided in my opinion.

 

[Azure]

OP, is your issue with a lifetime license or the free 50GB? It sounds like the latter.

 

[Brie]

i bought a lifetime membership to bulletvpn. i could not get it to work a couple of months latter.

windscribe free did not work so well either.

 

[BigWrench]

Pro lifetime, paid here. Through StackSocial years ago…. 2016 maybe???No issues

 

[blackice]

My take: If you got something for free, especially for a while, then that’s a boon. Shame on them for calling it a lifetime sub. Not really worth any outrage.

 

[ZeePriest]

I got downgraded from 50gb to 10gb also

 

[ForgottenSeer 100397]

Many of the lifetime offers on Stacksocial turned out not to be honoured. From backup/cloud storage that was closing accounts due to “illegal materials stored” (Degoo) to antivirus that later on was converted to a business-only brand (Cylance) to a VPN that became totally free (Ivacy).

These subscriptions should be avoided in my opinion.

Can you explain what you mean by Ivacy VPN becoming free? They acknowledge and honor subscriptions for life.

Windscribe's move on the free-lifetime accounts is not an issue for me. People accumulated free-lifetime accounts. I have confidence in Windscribe as a VPN service, and I am sure they will respect paid-lifetime accounts. The promotional sale of limited lifetime subscriptions led to Windscribe's growth and popularity.

Windscribe has contests on their Discord channel where lifetime subscriptions are among the prizes.

 

[Trident]

Can you explain what you mean by Ivacy VPN becoming free? They acknowledge and honor subscriptions for life.

They do (I guess, I am not a user) but they take money on Stacksocial for a lifetime subscription and then other users have this:

https://www.ivacy.com/free-vpn/

for free. To me, it looks a bit like ripoff. And what about the 2 Swedish treasures of the cloud storage (Degoo and PCloud) that took loads of money on lifetime storage, only to flag user content as “copyrighted” hiding behind a “bot” and terminating their accounts to get out of their commitment the easy way. When users tried to appeal, nobody even replied.




Practices that can only be described as shady. These practices hurt not only users via “buy today, bye tomorrow” actions, they also hurt the revenue of competitors whose services look more expensive. Users choose another service over the legitimate one, only to find out (sooner rather than later) that they will not be served the way they were promised at the time of buying. And all roads lead to Stacksocial as well as few other sites.

 

[ForgottenSeer 100397]

I tried the free Ivacy, but it's too restricted. Automatic and Netherlands only. Everything else has a "premium" label.

 

[silversurfer]

Just to inform... My Windscribe user account has still free 50GB/month, registered since 2016. For me is no need to use a VPN 24/7 so would be enough the free 10GB/month.

 

[roger_m]

I believe this is only affecting free users. Considering they are providing a service for free, I can understand why they chose to limit the data as it costs money to run a VPN service. I have a paid lifetime subscription. While I don't use it currently, Windscribe is a trustworthy VPN.

to a VPN that became totally free (Ivacy).

It's not completely free. They've just added a limited free plan, alongside the paid plans.

 

[Paul.R]

To clarify:

Relief codes are temporary upgrades designed to help people in locales where heavy government censorship costs lives. These run for an unspecified amount of time (Typically varies from incident to incident).

When we see internet accessibility return to pre-crisis we then examine when we can return our own service to normal.

Only relief codes are being rolled back at this time. If you have managed to hang on for a temp upgrade for several years...maybe consider it is time to finally upgrade to Pro? As it's only thanks to Pro users that these relief codes can be done in the first place. That they are intended for those in need.

 

[Digmor Crusher]

My Windscribe account was the 50 gb per month option and not the lifetime unlimited data option.

If anyone is interested:
No VPN - download 633 Mbps upload 121
Windscribe - 319 - 21 (nearest server)
Proton - 500 - 15 (fastest server with free version according to them)

Upload sure takes a hit, wanted to try Mulvad but no free trial option.