One-time purchase vs subscription: the real cost of planning apps

Five years of Sunsama costs $1,200. Five years of Motion costs $1,140. I built a planner app that costs eight euros once.

Let that sit for a second.

I’m not going to pretend the subscription model is always a scam. Some software genuinely costs money to run. Servers, sync infrastructure, a team of engineers keeping the lights on. That’s real. But somewhere along the way, the productivity app market decided every tool needs to be rented to you forever, and the math stopped making sense.

The subscription creep

Ten years ago, you bought an app. It was yours. Maybe there was a paid upgrade every couple of years if the developer kept working on it, and you decided whether to pay for it. That was the deal.

Then everything became SaaS. Calendar apps, task managers, note apps, habit trackers. Tools that do one thing on your device started charging you monthly for the privilege of continuing to exist on your device. The reasoning was always “ongoing development” and “cloud sync.” But plenty of these apps work fine offline and sync through your own iCloud or Google account. The infrastructure cost per user is negligible. What you’re paying for is the right to keep using the thing you already use.

What you’re actually paying for

Sync is cheap. Cloud storage is cheap. Push notifications are basically free. A solo developer can run all of that for a few dollars a month per user, if that. So when a planner app charges $20 a month, where is that money going?

Some of it is the team. Motion has a real engineering staff and they’re building genuinely complex scheduling AI. Fair. Sunsama, though, is a nice calendar wrapper. The features are good but the infrastructure footprint per user is tiny. You are not consuming $240 a year of server time.

A lot of what you’re paying for is the business model itself. Investors who backed the company expect recurring revenue. Marketing spend needs to be covered. Growth targets need to be hit. None of that has anything to do with whether the app works better for you, and it has nothing to do with whether it costs the company more to serve you in year three than it did in year one.

The one-time purchase argument

I sell Time Blokker for a one-time purchase. About eight euros. You pay once, you own it, it works. It doesn’t phone home. It doesn’t lock you out if your card expires. You’re not renting your own daily schedule from a company that could shut down or get acquired next quarter. If you want the full feature breakdown against the most popular paid planner, I wrote Time Blokker vs Structured — pricing is one of several differences.

I’m not claiming this is heroic. It’s just a better deal for the person using the app. If I stop updating Time Blokker tomorrow, your copy still works. Your data is on your device. You can keep planning your days with it for the next decade without paying me another cent.

That’s what owning software used to mean. I think it should still mean that.

The honest counterargument

I’d be dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge the other side. Subscriptions fund ongoing development. One-time purchases are a single spike of revenue and then you’re working for free. That’s a real problem for a solo developer. Server costs for sync don’t go away just because people stopped buying. Bug fixes for new OS versions take time. New features take time. If the money stops, the work gets harder to justify.

I don’t have a perfect answer. The model I’ve chosen works because Time Blokker is a focused app, not a platform, and because I’d rather have a large number of people pay a small amount once than a small number pay a large amount forever. It works for me. It might not work for a team of twenty or for a tool that needs heavy server-side compute. I get that.

The honest version of the subscription argument is this: if a company is genuinely building something that gets better every month, and you want that, pay for it. If what you actually want is a reliable planner that opens fast and shows your day, the case for paying forever is thin.

Most planner apps are not that. Most of them are a nice interface over your calendar, and charging $200 a year for that is a choice the market somehow accepted. If you’re skeptical that a fancier list is worth renting forever, the problem with to-do lists is the same problem these apps are charging you to not solve.

What I’d actually ask you to do

Next time you’re about to subscribe to a productivity app, do the five-year math. Multiply that monthly number by sixty. Look at it. Then ask whether what the app does for you is worth that number, or whether you’re paying for a business model that was designed before you ever showed up.

Time Blokker costs eight euros once. Do that math instead.