(Sprint and Verizon Hope No One Reads This)

You Can Still Get Out Of Cell Phone Contracts

CellBreaker is closing. The CellBreaker app will begin winding down in late 2015. If you were a fan of CellBreaker, then we are sorry: we failed you. If you were a foe, then you are welcome.

Three years ago, the CellBreaker founders set out to accomplish something really hard, something no one else had done and something all but about five people in the world thought was not even possible. Did we prove doubters wrong? Partially, yes. We actually proved them wrong on the most important point, that we could actually build an app that gave consumers the edge they needed to win disputes against big companies.

Just look at the two data points we included below. These two points are probably our greatest source of pride. We actually did a really good job at helping consumers win. What we failed to master, however, was how to make this both a stress-free experience for our customers and a profitable one for our company. We knew this was a challenge, and we knew that we had a choice: we could either...

• make helping people solve their contract problem the priority or
• make staying profitable as a business the priority.

1. we were not yet profitable
2. we knew we could be if we made a few key changes
3. we eventually figured out precisely what those few key changes were

Our decision to close Cellbreaker is only sort of sad because we are launching a better justice as a service app called Veeto. To be clear, Veeto is not just CellBreaker with a new name. Veeto is entirely new: new app, new value proposition, new target market, business model, new everything. Whereas CellBreaker focused exclusively on cell phone contracts, Veeto is for any buyer's remorse. Literally, any purchase from any company.

Update, June 2016:

Now that we have quietly launched Veeto, we thought we add an update here to further illustrate to you the massive difference between Cellbreaker and Veeto. Take one early Veeto customer who wanted to get out of her office lease contract. She used Veeto to get out in under a week, saving her $4,459 (you can read about her case here). By contrast, the average amount CellBreaker saved a customer was about $650. Huge savings difference, which is one of the obvious reasons why we think Veeto is a better model than CellBreaker was.

Plus, Veeto is much less expensive. On average, CellBreaker customers paid us about $215 to save about $650. With Veeto, it is just $20 per month to be a member, and members have unlimited Veeto Power, which means you could theoretically break a hundred contracts in a month for just $20. And since you could be Veetoing any purchase, large or small, a single Veeto might put thousands of dollars back in your pocket as opposed to the CellBreaker average of just $650. As consumers ourselves, that is a massive enough ROI that we think we can unequivocally say that closing CellBreaker to move on to Veeto is the right thing to do.

It is hard to say. There is likely a diversity of opinion, depending on whether you were among the 15,000 or so people that CellBreaker helped in some way over the last three years, or you were one of the Big Four US cell phone carriers (Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon) whose cell phone contracts CellBreaker absolutely destroyed. What we can tell you is that the US cell phone space has changed quite a bit since we first started, and most of the really important changes seem like competitive responses to the threat CellBreaker presented to cell phone carriers, who might have thought that they could mistreat people just because they had them locked into a two-year contract.

Think of this CellBreaker review--which "CellBreaker" is writing--as a CellBreaker complaint about itself. Although, on one hand, we seemed to have proven generally that entrepreneurs can defy odds with the right mix of optimism, determination, and intellectual discipline, we also confirmed that you cannot maintain your course on the strength of your idea alone. At some point--once you have run out of fundamental lessons to learn, run out of cash, or run out of the desire to depend on investment--the P&L statement must have a say too--to either bolster or detract from that innate entrepreneurial instinct that says never give up.

• We hope entrepreneurs remember that starting-up is not the art of avoiding pain, but the art of enduring it.
• We hope our investors remember that we helped change an industry, despite our casualty to that change.
• We hope our customers remember that you were our first and most important investors, and that investing your purchase dollars in entrepreneurs you believe in is the only risk-free investment there is.
• We hope that cell phone carriers remember that we hated the sin, not the sinner.

CellBreaker out...