Comment by throwaway431234

My bet at the time was that they have a bunch of hidden extra limits based on account age, IP/user agent information, etc. If that is true, their problem is that they advertise the larger limits instead of the smaller limits (to get more users signed up), and that they do not communicate when their extra limits apply and instead straight up upsell you, which are both dark patterns.

Fair point. I suspect it comes down to ghost reservations or stale caches. If a previous upload failed mid-flight but didn't roll back the quota reservation immediately, the backend thinks you're over the limit until a TTL expires. Or you delete something to free up space, but the decrement hasn't propagated to the replica checking your quota yet.

Fair point. I suspect it comes down to how they handle retries. If an upload times out but the counter already incremented, the system sees the space as used until an async cleanup job runs. It is really common to have ghost usage in eventually consistent systems.

The marketing move of offering an unlimited plan reveals that storage and traffic are not that expensive and someone made a choice that light users will subsidize heavy users. With that, hiding your data from you and subsequently deleting it, at least without first encouraging you to download it within some post-downgrade grace period, would be a choice, not necessity, and is user-hostile.

If it is an actual necessity—a service chose to market an unlimited plan to attract more users, and then realized they are losing money on storage and traffic so much that they would unapologetically burn bridges with existing users who showed themselves as willing to pay (who maybe needed to downgrade temporarily for whatever reason) with the above move—and yet their strategy is apparently to keep offering that plan (in hopes to turn things around with more light users joining?), I would question whether that service has serious issues with even medium term planning.

As a listener I'd pay (a reasonable amount like <$5 per month) to only listen to mixes, especially if it can be filtered by bitrate.

Their best feature is social feed - I only see reposts from people I follow. But for branching out / discovery might be cool to see what their feed looks like, so something like "show followees feed".

Overall what Im saying is they treat their non-paying customers better then their paying ones. Once I was a paying customer after having and using my free account for over 7 years then converting to a paying customer and having to cancel Soundcloud became hostile.