Why I'm charging once for my app, not monthly

Everyone told me to make it a subscription.

Not unkindly. It’s just the default now. You build a piece of software, you charge monthly, and the spreadsheet does the rest. Recurring revenue is the phrase people say with a slightly dreamy look, and I understand why. Predictable income is lovely. I run a hosting business. I know.

But I’ve been building a Mac app on the side, My House, My Things, for recording what’s in a house, what it cost and what needs doing to it, and it’s going to be £34, once. No subscription. I want to explain why, because the reasoning has nothing to do with the app and everything to do with a question I think every business owner should ask about the things they pay for monthly.

The question

Does it cost you something every month to provide this?

That’s it. That’s the whole test.

Hosting costs me money every month. Servers, backups, the monitoring, the time when something breaks at eleven on a Tuesday. Charging monthly for it is honest, because the cost is monthly. Stop paying and the service genuinely stops, not out of spite but because the thing you were paying for was ongoing.

The app fails the test completely. It lives in one file on your Mac. There’s no account, no cloud, nothing on a server of mine that holds your data or does your thinking. Once it’s on your machine, it costs me nothing for you to keep using it. So what exactly would a monthly fee be paying for?

The honest answer is “the right to keep using something you already have”. And there’s a word for that. It’s rent.

Rent dressed as a service

I don’t think subscriptions are wicked. I pay for plenty and most of them earn it. The problem is the ones that took something that used to be a purchase and turned it into a lease, without the product changing at all. You’re not paying for a service. You’re paying for the switch to stay in the on position.

Software that runs entirely on your own computer, with your own data, in your own file, is about the clearest case of that I can think of. If I charged monthly for it, the fee wouldn’t be funding anything you’d notice. It would be funding my spreadsheet.

There’s a second, quieter reason. A subscription changes what the product has to be. A one-off purchase has to be good enough to buy. A subscription has to be hard enough to leave. Those are different design goals, and only one of them is on your side.

What I’m giving up

I’d be dishonest if I pretended this was free.

I’m giving up the predictable line on the chart. Every sale is a sale, not the start of a stream. Updates get funded by new people buying, not by existing people continuing to pay, which means I have to keep it worth buying rather than merely worth keeping. If there’s ever a genuinely new version, I’ll have to earn that again too.

I’m also giving up the easy story. “£34 once” doesn’t sound like a business model. It sounds like a tool. I’m alright with that. I’ve spent years telling clients that a website is a thing you own, not a thing you rent, and it would be a strange time to discover I didn’t believe it.

The same test, pointed at your website

Here’s where this stops being about a Mac app.

Look at what you pay monthly for your website and ask the question of each line. Hosting, backups, someone keeping the software patched, someone to ring: those cost money every month to provide, and paying monthly for them is fair. That’s most of what I charge on a rolling basis, and I can tell you exactly what each pound is doing.

Then look at the rest. A site builder that holds your pages on its platform, where stopping the payment means the site goes dark. A plugin licence that switches features off the moment it lapses. A “premium” tier whose main feature is that the basic tier has been made worse. None of those are services. They’re rent, and the thing you’re renting is your own website.

The build itself should be a purchase. You pay for it, it’s yours, and if you leave, you take it with you. If someone can’t tell you what happens to your site when you stop paying them, that’s the answer.

So, £34, once. Not because I’m against being paid every month. Because I’m only willing to be paid every month for things that cost me every month. It turns out that rule doesn’t care whether the thing is a website or an app.