Limewire's Discounted Upgrade Program
 

Please comment if you can offer assistance or your own experiences at battling LW's automatic billing horrorshow. Thanks.

I bought LimeWire PRO last December. I know that I have to pay to get the latest version.

But by LimeWire's own description (http://www.limewire.com/english/content/faq.shtml#i2a) existing customers like me are allowed "to purchase an additional 6 months of technical support and free updates for a reduced price" (see highlighted attachment).

There is absolutely NO indication anywhere of how this discount can actually be claimed. Other customers in my position aren't given the price to which they're entitled. They're just hit with the standard $18.88 purchase machinery.

I've already read in other postings that LW's online support queries don't recognize a purchaser's email address after six months.

BUT, the *******s are also not answering email inquiries that I've sent them (they've been much more polite than this one).

So maybe LW folks read this forum...

** Moderator: no personal information follows **

Here's the pertinent part of my emailed order confirmation. It should be enough for them to go on:

Merchant: LimeWire PRO
Order ID: VWNA20765192
Order Placed: 16-Dec-04 06:55 AM
Amount of Transaction: $18.88
Payment Type: VISA

Not true my subscription gust ran out a month ago and when I went to upgrade. LimeWire informed me on the upgrade page that I needed to purchase LimeWire pro again. When I clicked buy it gave me the discount price.

Still looks like a scam; I just put myself through it
 

Just to publicly experiment on myself, I went through the procedure, and there was NO recognition of my past purchases.

Thanks for responding Grandpa, but it didn't work for me.

For everyone else's benefit. can you please elaborate about links that you clicked on or pieces of information that you supplied that allowed the upgrade proces to recognize you?

BE WARNED EVERYONE WHO HAS A 6-MONTH+ PRO - YOU HAVE A *VERY* GOOD CHANCE OF BEING SCREWED

...unless Grandpa supplies foolproof details of how to re-order.

*** Hey LimeWire Bozos: check these out...

My old order number was VWNA20765192;
My new order number is VZNC0C0CCA64, and I had to pay $18.88 for it.

* You are ripping off your customers *

take a look at these please:

I've upgraded twice now. Both times when I went to my link it informed me that my subscription had run out and gave me a short time to upgrade at reduced cost. The pictures above are a good indication of my experience.

Personally I do not have experience of the how the discounted offer works, I renewed recently , but HAD to use a diffwrent E-mail address, so i didn't bother to pursue the matter

My point is that 18.88$ is a fairly paltry amount of money, and the ammount of the discount ... I forget ....is that $4.50? is a tiny amount .... It's really no big deal!

Looking at your post, I see you purchased pro on 16 Dec 04, so that expired 16 June 05, and it is now over 2 1/2 months later.

I am sure that the discounted offer does not last indefinitely, probably no more than a month ... but I have no actual idea.

I think you may have gone to renew a little late, so don't worry about it ...that's the cost of a cup of coffee in NY I gather! Limewire has not ripped you off or done anything illegal .... there is no billing horrorshow.

My guess is that the e-mail address for pro customers stays on the data base for possibly 7 months, , but that it is removed after lets say 8 months. When Limewire has no record of an E-mail address, it will not respond.

I am guessing a bit here, but I think this how the thing works and I resent some of the stuff you have seen fit to say about Limewire IMHO you should just get out and enjoy using it :) :)

And LeonMcS's post seems to bear out what I said pretty well.

OK! Thanks for the info.

The fact that they emailed out notices makes sense. A number of months after my initial purchase I changed email addresses as well, and would have missed just this kind of alert.

This explains a lot! but it still ****** me off how customer support questions aren't answered even when they're solicited.

I retract the insults, mostly.

LimeWire guys: in your FAQ, would you please at least be a bit more clear and mention the conditions under which the discounted price can be taken advantage of?

Thanks a lot, fine people.

LimeWire's Discounted Upgrade Plan - actually not illegal
 

It's just not clearly described until your first purchase expires.

(I wanted to get the subject line changed if I could)

Again I may be wrong but I think this discount idea is a fairly new one brought on somewhat by the fact there has recently been a 6 month period with almost nothing in the way of new releases. Certainly the discount has not been mentioned on the website until VERY recently.

I put it down to teething problems, certainly there is a little bit of amiguity in the conditions of the discount, and I expect they will clarify this soon...

While they are doing this a little bit of an update on the user guide might be in order, unless that has been changed in the last few days.

Anyway Norman thanks for the reply..LW is a pretty good set up most of the time :D The only thing I can add is this. AFAIK LW keeps a data base of pro customers. As soon as the 6 months ( or however long it is over that) is up the e-mail addresses of those customers are removed from the database.

If an ex-pro customer e-mails, their e-mail address will not be recognised and in 99% of cases the mail will be trashed, unread.

All the Best

Hi all

Hobo, I was curious so looked up my old Pro records. The discount has been around for a few years, even before LW moved its price from 9.50 to 18.88. Back in May 2003, the discounted renewal for LimeWire 2.9.10 was 7.50

Quote:

Thank you for supporting LimeWire in the past! Please note that your PRO download page expires shortly. We hope that you will continue to support LimeWire by renewing your LimeWire PRO for another 6 months. Your support goes toward the continued development of open peer networks such as Gnutella. For a $7.50 contribution, we will provide you with a new version of LimeWire PRO and activate a new personalized download page which will allow you to download LimeWire PRO updates for another 6 months. Please take advantage of this offer by visiting your special upgrade offer page: http://sales.limewire.com/[snipped] Note that you can now buy LimeWire PRO on CD. Just visit our download page if you are interested. http://www.limewire.com/index.jsp/download Time is running out to download updated versions of LimeWire PRO with your personalized download page. Users of version 2.5.5 or earlier must upgrade to get new GWebCache connection establishment capabilities. We recommend that all users upgrade to the latest version. Version 2.9.10 of LimeWire is currently available. There have been great improvements recently in the ability to search for rare files. As the next few releases role out, more improvements will be seen with searches and downloads. We are already seeing some payoff with a quieter network and better rare searches. Gnutella technology is rapidly improving! For your records, your current download page is: http://sales.limewire.com/[snipped] Thank you again for supporting LimeWire! Your support is greatly appreciated.

The following is dated from Nov 2003.

Quote:

As you may know, LimeWire PRO is currently priced at $18.88 and may undergo further increases. As a loyal customer, we are pleased to offer you LimeWire PRO and 6 more months of free upgrades for $14.50 . We foresee major improvements over the next few months. .

SpineyNorman, as the originator of this thread, you should be able to edit the title. If not, PM a mod like Lord of the Rings and he can probably get it arranged.

As far as the Pro page lookup problems, a few were fixed last week. Now that LW has a new web dev, perhaps the Pro page problems and suggestions will we addressed sooner. Actually, I'm a bit disappointed ;) When LW didn't pay much attention to the Pro problems, I was somewhat reassured they they were spending most of their time on the coding folks rather than the business types.

Another option would be to save the email confirming your order. Add 6 months to the date you recieved it and you'll have a good idea of when to renew. From memory the first time I repurchased was 6 months and 2 weeks after I had originally paid for Pro.

better yet would be a past subscriber's address is remembered, and sent to a Profile or History page.

I just checked: ironically I can still look up my Pro page, but the support button just kicks me to the free download page. I think I'm due to renew, IIRC. If so, I'll await a "renew" email, since I don't think I've ever received one for may last 4 Pros.

Go figure. Still some bugs to be worked out there :o

I don't think that you will recieve the e-mail. When I was 2 weeks away from the 6 months I sent support a e-mail asking about the reduced rate, I was wanting to know how to pay for LimeWire at the reduced rate, wanted to know if I needed to pay before the 6 months was up. I never recieved a responce but when the next beta came out I went to my download page when I clicked on download it informed me I needed to renew for the discount rate.

You will not get a 'renew' email. My confirmation email is sitting happily in my email box so I have a good idea when to renew next. It would make sense if they sent out such an email but they don't. Either check your credit card statements if you paid that way or your cheque statements or as I stated before, save your email.

Hehe, Leon: [ Is that you Angel? If so, thanks for looking into this]

As you can see from above, I've saved my confirmation emails for a few years. ;)

Those give the date purchased, not the expiry date. As LW once told me, the expiration date used to be generally around the 15th two months after receiving the "about to expire" message on the Pro page.

I'd like to see the actual expiration date on a page accessible even after Pro expires. According to the email method, my anniversary date should be some multiple of 6 months since November 2, 2002 9:23:29 PM GMT-06:00 (I've never let my Pro lapse, IIRC).