The lifetime deal that doesn't bleed

You sold eight hundred lifetime licenses in a launch week. It funded the year. It also created eight hundred customers who will never pay again and may use the product forever.

On per-instance pricing, that's a slow leak: every lifetime account holds a database slot, a seat, a meter that runs whether they log in or not. Founders who did this on metered infra are still paying for the launch.

On Hoody, eight hundred lifetime customers are eight hundred containers on one bare metal box. Copied from one template, they share nearly all their disk blocks; the kernel's page cache holds their common binaries once; the ones who stopped logging in last year burn nothing. The active two hundred fit comfortably. The idle six hundred fit for free.

A lifetime deal on metered infrastructure is a liability; on a flat-rate box, it's just customers.