Interest rates have gone down though. Presumably you sell your house and break the current 3.5% mortgage. Then buy a bigger / more expensive house and lock in at 1.5%. Overall your monthly payments remain similar.
This is not a good way to measure things. Did you just exchange 10 years of monthly payments for 30 years of "similar" monthly payments?
My mother protested to me over the cost of her new house, defending the idea that she could afford it by pointing out that monthly payments were similar -- property taxes on the new house were about the same size as mortgage payments on the old one. I was kind of horrified by this; conceptually, when you make a mortgage payment, your net worth goes up. When you make a tax payment, it goes down.
This is how we get a housing bubble. The expectation of never ending credit that gets cheaper and cheaper. One day interest rates will go up and your house will not be as valuable as your mortgage says it is.
I think the sentiment is that Basecamp is no Led Zeppelin. In that they perhaps haven't achieved the record breaking, Unicorn level growth that many startups strive for. But perhaps that's OK for them?
They've got some great tunes, a loyal following, and can still put on a fantastic show. They're superstars by any definition.
Peter Frampton had a standout, influential "live" album and an innovative style of playing that will forever be remembered.
Led Zeppelin had a series of standout albums and hit songs spanning close to a decade, spawning Unicorn level sales, crowds and generational fandom that held influence on rock and roll for 40+ years.
But the band members of Zeppelin eventually succumbed to the excesses of their success. They split up after some really dark days. The scope and size of their success wasn't long term manageable on a personal level. But their legacy remains.
Whereas Frampton is still playing small live venues today!!!!
Price! While my current phone plan includes "unlimited text messaging" ... this wasn't always the case. And even today, if I am roaming out of region, I get charged anywhere between 10 - 45 cents per text message. All here in Canada!
The non-profit take on this is new, however, there are for profit cloud services that offer similar one-time payment "lifetime" plans.
Pcloud for example charges a one-time lifetime 0.35 cents per GB, and their marketing language states:
"We have defined a Lifetime account as 99 years or the lifetime of the account holder, whichever is shorter."
Some thoughts on this:
It probably works better at scale if you control the storage infrastructure (to control the costs). If you are reselling Amazon, and 10 years from now they either raise the price significantly, or discontinue the storage you are using, how would you maintain the service without new (renewal) cash flow.
To solve this later in life you would want to / need to migrate the data to newer better more cost efficient storage. There are large scale costs associated with doing this. Dropbox eventually moved away from Amazon for these reasons, which provided balance sheet savings but it gets fuzzy when factoring the real world costs of owning and maintaining large scale storage infrastructure.
Offering 1 GB free and file sharing between accounts is an invitation for nefarious activities, and it seems like the only way they could manage that would involve breaking one of Permanent.org's core tenets ... Someone will have to look at the files to police it. Or the free 1 GB becomes a liability, not a loss leader. How will they do this?
Once they have your money and a few years have passed there might be an incentive for the organization to gradually degrade the service. Make it more and more difficult to use, in an effort to keep costs down.
And 10 years later when they lose interest in the project, what would stop them from selling the whole thing (cashing out) to a for profit firm ..... Looking at you .ORG / ICANN?
