Why we sell software once instead of by subscription
Subscriptions are honest when a product costs money to run every month. For a utility that does its work on your own machine, they are mostly a way of charging rent on a finished thing.
Almost every app you install now would prefer to bill you monthly. We do not, for most of what we make, and the reasoning is less principled than it sounds — it comes down to what a piece of software actually costs to keep alive.
When a subscription is honest
Some products genuinely cost money every month that you use them. If a service stores your data, syncs it between devices, runs computation on someone else's hardware, or maintains an index that goes stale in a week, then the bill never stops arriving for the people who built it. Charging once for that is not generosity; it is a promise the vendor cannot keep, and it ends the way those always end — with the service shutting down or quietly degrading.
A subscription is also honest when the product is genuinely unfinished in a useful way: it changes every month because the thing it describes changes every month.
When it is not
A batch renamer does its work on your Mac. An archive utility unpacks a file on your disk. A contact editor reads a database that is already on your machine. Once the code is written, our cost of you running it tomorrow is zero.
There is still real ongoing work — new macOS versions break things every autumn, bugs need fixing, hardware changes. But that is maintenance, and maintenance is what the purchase price pays for. It is not a recurring cost proportional to your usage, and pricing it as one means charging rent on a finished thing.
What we actually do
For most of the collection: a free download, a trial that you start deliberately rather than one that begins the moment you launch the app, and a one-time purchase that unlocks the thing permanently. Where an app has a free tier, the free tier is meant to be genuinely usable rather than a demo with the useful parts removed.
Some specifics, because vague pricing claims are worthless:
- Trials are started by you, and they do not roll into a charge when they end.
- Mac and mobile are separate purchases where the apps are separate products. We would rather say that plainly than let you discover it after paying.
- Some apps are paid outright on the App Store. Some are free with an unlock. The product pages say which, and what the unlock covers.
The part that is a real cost to us
This model is worse for us in one specific way, and it would be dishonest not to say so: revenue arrives once per customer, which makes income lumpy and makes the second year of a product harder to fund than the first. Subscription businesses are more predictable, which is a large part of why so many have switched.
We accept that, but it has consequences you should know about. It means we build narrow tools rather than sprawling suites, because a narrow tool can be finished and maintained by a small team on one-time revenue. It means we are slower to add features that would need a server behind them. And it means when we do eventually ship a major new version, we may charge for it rather than pretending a year of work was free.
What it buys you
Mainly this: the version you paid for keeps working. If we stopped shipping updates tomorrow, the app on your disk would carry on renaming files or unpacking archives until an OS change broke it. Nothing phones home to check whether you are still paying. Nothing degrades into read-only mode.
It also means your files stay yours in a boring, practical sense. Apps that do their work locally and save to open or documented formats do not need you to keep a subscription current in order to open last year's project.
That is the whole argument. It is not a moral position about subscriptions — it is that a tool which runs entirely on your hardware should be sold to you, not rented to you.