Buy once, own it: our take on software you actually keep
Subscription fatigue is real. Here's the case for buy-once software — when one-time pricing makes sense, when a subscription is honest, and why we push a lifetime option every time we can.
At some point in the last decade, software quietly became a landlord. Your notes app, your PDF reader, the thing that removes backgrounds from photos, the weather app with the nice icons — all renting themselves back to you, monthly, forever. And most people are quietly tired of it. “Subscription fatigue” isn’t a marketing phrase; it’s the specific low-grade dread of opening a bank statement full of small charges for things you forgot you were paying for.
We build tools and we use tools, and we got tired of it too. So here’s our honest, non-purist position on buy-once versus subscription — including where we think a subscription is genuinely fair.
Why everything became a subscription
Not because the software needed it. Because the business wanted it. Recurring revenue is beautiful on a spreadsheet and beloved by investors: predictable, compounding, easy to project. A customer paying $4/month for three years beats one who pays $39 once — on paper, it’s not close. So the entire industry drifted toward monthly, whether or not the product had any ongoing cost to justify it.
The uncomfortable truth about a lot of subscriptions is that they aren’t priced for the value — they’re priced for the forgetting. The model quietly bets you won’t cancel. That’s the plan. And we didn’t want to run a business that roots for its own customers to be forgetful.
When buy-once is right
When the software runs on your machine. If a tool does its work locally — on your CPU, with your files, no servers of ours involved — there’s no ongoing cost on our side to justify a recurring bill. You should just own it. A desktop app you paid for once shouldn’t charge you again next month for standing still on your hard drive.
Buy-once also purchases something a subscription can’t: trust. When you own it, you’re not lying awake wondering whether we’ll jack the price at renewal, gate a feature you rely on behind a new tier, or let the app quietly rot because the revenue’s already recurring and nobody’s watching. Ownership aligns us — we have to earn the next sale, not just coast on the last cancellation you forgot to make.
When a subscription is actually honest
Here’s the part purists skip: sometimes a subscription is the fair option. Specifically, when there’s a real, ongoing cost on our side — servers doing actual work every month you use the tool. A cloud service that transcribes, renders, or processes for you every time you hit “go” is genuinely costing money to run, continuously. Charging monthly for that isn’t a trick; it’s just the bill, passed through honestly.
We didn’t kill every subscription, and we’re not going to. We have products with monthly plans, and new ones will too. What we refuse to do is make a subscription the price of something that costs us nothing to keep running.
Our actual rule
- Runs on your machine? Buy it once. You own the thing.
- Runs on our servers, every time? Pay for what that costs. Fair is fair.
- Always offer a way out of monthly — a lifetime or one-time option — even when the spreadsheet frowns at us for it.
No “Pro tier” that’s just the normal tier with a lock icon removed. No countdown timers manufacturing fake urgency. No “you’re on the Free plan 😢” nag screens engineered to wear you down.
The bottom line
We didn’t kill the subscription. We just refuse to make it the only door. Where the work happens on your machine, you buy once and own it — the way software used to work, and honestly still should. And where it costs us to run, we’ll charge fairly and still try to hand you a lifetime option. Buy once, own it. Adobe could never.