Why All Things AI apps have no subscription

The pricing model

Every consumer app we make is priced one of two ways. Most are free with every feature included on the day you install them. A few are a one-time purchase: you pay once on the App Store and you own that version and every update we ship to it. That is the whole menu. There is no monthly plan, no annual plan, no "Pro" tier, no feature that unlocks after seven days, and no trial that quietly turns into a charge.

We are not against subscriptions in general. Software with real recurring costs (servers, storage, people answering the phone) should charge for them, and a monthly fee is the honest way to do that. Our apps do not have those costs. A row counter, a gold ledger, a medication log or an interval timer costs us the same to run in year three as on day one, because it runs on your phone, not on our servers. Charging every month for that would be charging for your habit, not for our work.

What we do instead

We keep the apps small and specific. Each one does one job for one kind of person: a substitute teacher tracking pay, a beekeeper logging inspections, a parent counting teen driving hours. Because each app is narrow, it is cheap to build and cheap to maintain, and it can be free or nearly free without a catch.

We keep the data on your device. Almost every app works fully offline, needs no account, and stores what you enter in the app's own storage on the iPhone. That is not only a privacy stance; it is what makes the pricing possible. No backend means no bill for a backend, which means nothing for a subscription to pay for.

We make money when an app is worth installing. New people find the app, some of them pay the one-time price, and that is the business. It keeps the incentive in the right place: we win by making the first version good enough to recommend, not by making the existing version harder to leave.

What you give up

Cloud sync. Because there is no server, an app cannot push your data to a second phone or a web dashboard on its own. If you want it on another device you export it (most apps export CSV or a plain file) or rely on your normal iPhone backup. There is no "log in anywhere" promise.

Shared workspaces. Two people cannot edit the same record live from two phones. For a household log this is usually fine because one phone is always the one within reach; for a team it is not, and we say so on the app page rather than pretend otherwise.

Live data feeds. A few of our apps do need a network connection (live scores, a news-to-market lookup) and their pages say so. But the typical app here will not fetch prices, weather or anything else, because a feed is exactly the kind of recurring cost that turns into a recurring fee.

How updates are funded

Updates are funded by the next install, not by the last one. When an app is free, the update is paid for by the studio's paid apps and by the fact that maintaining a small, offline app is cheap: an iOS release, a bug fix, a new field in a log. When an app is a one-time purchase, every update to that app is included in the price you paid. We do not release a "version 2" as a separate purchase to reset the meter.

If an app ever stopped being worth maintaining, the version on your phone would keep working, because it never depended on us being online. That is the part of this model we care about most: your record does not expire when our attention does.

Questions we get

Is "free" really free?

Yes. A free app has every feature enabled, no ads, no in-app purchases and no paid tier. If that ever changes for an app, its page will say so before you install.

What does "one-time purchase" include?

The app and every update we ship to it, on every iPhone signed into your Apple ID. It does not include a separate future app.

Why no cloud sync?

Sync needs a server, a server needs an account, and both need a subscription to pay for them. We would rather ship an app that works offline for free than one that charges monthly for a feature most single-purpose logs do not need.

How do I move my data to a new phone?

Through your normal iPhone backup and restore, or by exporting from inside the app and importing on the new one.

Do you collect anything?

Most apps collect nothing at all and have no analytics SDK. The few that use anonymous crash or usage metrics say so on their privacy page.