One payment, not a subscription

You need this app during a bad month, not for the rest of your life. Billing you every month for that would be charging rent on a problem you are trying to end.

Almost every app in this category is a subscription now. Some are five pounds a month, some are nine, and a few will happily take it for years while you use the thing once.

We understand exactly why. Subscriptions are worth far more per customer, they make revenue predictable, and the App Store rewards them. Every piece of advice a small developer reads says charge monthly.

Why we are not going to

Think about when somebody actually opens this app.

Their tenancy has ended and the deposit has not come back. The insurer is disputing what was agreed on the phone. A relationship has ended badly and there are messages that matter. They need a document this week, and then — with any luck — they need never think about it again.

A subscription turns that into a small monthly reminder of the worst thing that happened to them that year. Either they remember to cancel, or they pay for months out of inattention. Both are bad. One is worse for them and better for us, which is precisely why we should not build it.

And one free export, in full

One conversation exports free. Full quality, no watermark, up to the first 25 messages — a real document you can open and read, not a sample with the useful part removed.

That is deliberate too. This app does something difficult and does not do it perfectly every time. If somebody shared a poster into the chat, the app reads the writing on the poster and cannot always tell it from a message. You should find that out before paying, not after.

So the free export is not a taster. It is the actual product, on your actual conversation, so you can judge it on your own evidence.

What one payment means for us

We make money once per customer, so the app has to be good enough that people recommend it. There is no recurring revenue to smooth over a bad version. If it does not work we do not get a second month to fix it — we get a refund and a one-star review.

That is a healthier pressure than the alternative, which is designing for retention on an app nobody should need to retain.

Will the price go up?

Possibly, later. Introductory prices exist for a reason and this is one: a new app with no reviews has to earn its way past apps with thousands.

If it does rise, it will not rise for anybody who has already bought it. That is the whole point of a one-time purchase — you bought the app, not a month of it.