Vpn Secure Parent Company Ceo Explains Why He Had To Axe Thousands Of ‘lifetime’deals

Customers are blasting VPN Secure’s new parent company after it abruptly axed thousands of “lifetime” accounts. The reason? The CEO admits in an interview with The Register that his team didn’t dig deep enough before acquiring the virtual private network outfit, and simply can’t afford to honor those legacy deals.

“The technical debt and server costs associated with supporting a legacy promise made many years ago became unsustainable for a modern VPN infrastructure,” InfiniteQuant CEO Romain Brabant told The Register, which hunted him down through a cached version of a now-disappeared website.

The kerfuffle started in April, when VPN Secure users began receiving emails saying that their lifetime accounts had been terminated. It’s unclear how much these users paid for the privilege of lifetime service, but a ZDNet listicle from 2022 advertised it at $27.99, heavily discounted from a claimed regular price of $1,194.

In May, they learned why: the company that acquired VPN Secure claimed it didn’t know about the lifetime deals at the time of purchase.

In an email [PDF] one frustrated user shared with The Register, VPN Secure argued that its acquisition of the business in 2023 was an asset-only deal – meaning it took over the technology, infrastructure, and customer database, but not the previous owner’s liabilities. The new parent, InfiniteQuant Ltd, claims the former owner, an Australian outfit known as BoostNetwork Pty Ltd, didn’t disclose thousands of lifetime deals sold via platforms like StackSocial. 

“We discovered this only months later,” VPN Secure said in the email, “when a large portion of our resources were strained by these LTD accounts and high support volume from users who, though part of the database, provided no sustaining income.” 

Users didn’t care for the excuses, with many taking to Reddit and Trustpilot to express their dissatisfaction as what they viewed as “poor form,” “gaslighting,” “a big lie” and the like. 

Others questioned how a buyer could miss the existence of widely advertised lifetime subscriptions – easily found through a Google search for “VPN Secure lifetime offer” that turns up past StackSocial offers. 

A follow-up email to lifetime users on May 11 didn’t help matters, either. 

In the second message, VPN Secure explained that it did do due diligence, including looking at the past year of financials BoostNetwork Pty provided, “but nowhere in the listing, profit and loss statement, or communication was there any mention of lifetime deals.” 

Again, Reddit users discussing the follow-up email over the weekend weren’t impressed.

Ownership of InfiniteQuant: A Tale of Two Entities

The provenance of InfiniteQuant is somewhat confusing as well. There’s a trading company in the British Virgin Islands with that name, but it claims not to be the firm behind the deal: “Due to continued misdirected messages—including from media — we are now receiving so many emails that it is disrupting our ability to use our inbox for legitimate business purposes,” the BVI InfiniteQuant told us. “We have filed a formal complaint with the VPN provider but have not received a response.”

Rather, the InfiniteQuant that bought VPN Secure appears to be a Bahamas-registered company that once marketed offshore incorporation and tax residency services, based on a cached version of its now-missing website. It also appears to own a company that offers male genitalia enhancement services (same parent company name, same address).

We were mostly focused on the technology and did not dig deep enough into the legacy customer agreements

The Register managed to track down InfiniteQuant CEO Romain Brabant through that cached website to discuss the VPN Secure deal (he declined to talk about any other businesses). He admitted that his company might have made a mistake by failing to notice those lifetime memberships. 

“We were mostly focused on the technology and did not dig deep enough into the legacy customer agreements,” Brabant told us, but defended his decision to cancel the lifetime plans. 

Brabant claimed there’s precedent for the decision, pointing to MyHeritage’s 2012 acquisition of genealogy site Geni.com, after which lifetime “Pro” subscriptions were discontinued. 

He noted that VPN Secure offered discounted plans to affected users, but acknowledged some may never have seen the offer. For that, he blamed another problem: a very old mailing list. 

The original email sent to lifetime users had a bounce rate of over 20 percent, Brabant told us, and the company’s email distribution service suspended it for a week.

“We had to clean the list with EmailListVerify, and use professional platform[s] like MailJet and SendGrid to increase deliverability of our announcement,” he said.

Brabant added that VPN Secure intends to send out a third email to lifetime customers in a few days, apologizing for emails not going out and owning up to the fact that “a warning that doesn’t land isn’t a warning.” 

But VPN Secure insists in the message, which has yet to be sent to customers, that it “inherited a fragile product” when the sale closed, claiming 90 percent of its user base were lifetime subscribers.

“We had to make the hardest decision a small business can make — to cut a legacy program that was no longer survivable,” VPN Secure says in the forthcoming email. “We didn’t imagine the previous owner would distribute a high volume of unsustainable ‘lifetime’ offers and never document them.”

Regardless, it appears the decision is final, and no refunds will be offered to customers. Instead, former lifetime users will be offered discounted plans, as they’ll find out in a few days when the email lands. ®

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