Legacy paid users of the popular podcast app Pocket Casts are being shown ads and directed to pay a subscription of $40 a year in order to remove them. This violates an agreement which promised them ad-free usage for life under what was initially branded Pocket Casts Lifetime and later rebranded to Pocket Casts Champion …
Pocket Casts originally started as a one-time purchase app costing around $10. It later switched to a freemium model in which free users were shown ads while subscribers to Pocket Casts Plus were not. After complaints from those who’d already paid the one-time fee, they were declared to be Pocket Casts Lifetime members, which gave them free access to Plus.
When the app was bought by Automatic, that branding was changed to Pocket Cast Champion, but nothing else changed.
As The Verge reports, however, these legacy members are now seeing ads and being pointed to a $40 a year plus subscription to remove them. Users are seeing conflicting reports from the company on whether or not they are expected to pay.
A Pocket Casts employee said that the only way to remove the banner ads is to pay for a Plus subscription, and that they were introduced to “sustain the continued work and maintenance of the app.” This conflicts with a statement from [Automattic CEO] Matt Mullenweg, however, who says the ads appearing on lifetime member accounts are a bug, and that the company is working to fix it. “Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads,” Mullenweg said in a Hacker News thread. “I don’t believe in ‘lifetime’ purchases, and we don’t create new ones at Automattic, but we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a “Champions” account, which is a lifetime you-get-the-best-of-whatever-we-sell deal.”
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Image: Automattic