Why we charge for Apps when other apps are free

Certain features in our Apps are Premium features, meaning that you need to pay a fee to be able to use them.

Why our Apps are Not Free of Cost

Privacy is a core feature in our products. We offer a simple pricing model, just like real-world products: you pay money upfront, and you get to use our products. We do not engage in complex monetization models like advertising or selling your personal data or location information to data brokers.

We believe that our apps are worth every penny, for many reasons.

We Respect You

• We respect your privacy: We are a private California company, not a fly-by-night operation or a massive scam to collect and sell people’s personal information.

• We do not make money from ads: There are no ads in our apps. Not in the free version, not in any of the Premium features. We do not make money by showing you ads.

• We do not sell your data: Many “free” and cheap apps on Google Play and Apple App Store do all sorts of things that we are fundamentally against. We don’t collect any personal information, we don’t sell any data to anyone.

• You are our customer, our primary source of revenue: We make money by building superior products that we hope you, our users, enjoy. We hope you will want to support us by purchasing Premium features.

• No predatory subscriptions: We offer simple one-time payments / lifetime purchases. We do not engage in predatory pricing like some apps on Google Play or Apple App Store.

Why Buy Premium

• To make sure we are not forced to shut down: Offering cheap $1 or free one-time purchases is not sustainable for app development. Apps need constant updates, even if the feature set does not change, because new Android and iOS versions are being released every year. Our flagship app, Hermit, for example, has been constantly updated since 2015. We don’t want to be the company that made a few million dollars from a $1 app and then shut down with no updates.

• Lifetime Purchase: For many apps, we offer the option of a Lifetime Purchase for specific features. You buy it once, it’s yours forever. You pay a flat one-time fee, then you can keep using those features forever.

• Subscriptions Optional: Certain products and features have ongoing costs; for these, we may offer the option of a recurring subscription. Your purchase helps fund ongoing costs as well as future development.

• Free Upgrades: Once you purchase Premium (either via a Lifetime Purchase or via a Subscription), future upgrades are free. We release innovative features every few weeks.

• Free is Forever: If you are still not convinced that Premium is for you, the free version works forever, no ads, no time limits, just limited to Free-only features.

Per-Feature Purchases

When a brand new app is released with a core set of features, it does not make sense to charge upfront for all yet-to-be-built features that may be on our future roadmap. Obviously that would not be fair to customers.

But when we add new features over multiple years and decades, it’s not sustainable to offer all of them to existing customers for the same price they paid years or decades earlier. That would not be fair to us developers.

Previously, companies used to charge for each major release (think Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop). Users could either continue to use their previous paid-for version, or pay for the upgrade. Some app vendors have tried to bring this model to apps: at some point, they stop releasing new features for v1, and force everyone to pay again for v2 (and v3, v4, etc.). We do not like this path: we offer free updates to existing features in perpetuity if you already paid once for a Premium feature.

So when we develop new Premium features, we list them as separate purchasable items. This guarantees that developers can get paid for the (non-trivial) effort in developing the new features. Existing paid-for features are improved and supported in perpetuity for no extra charge for years/decades. Just check our track record!

This offers a sustainable path forward while being fair to both customers and users. We hope you understand and appreciate this; a lot of thought has gone into this pricing model.

Uniform Global Pricing

(Alternatively: Why are prices in India not cheaper?)

Our apps have a 4.6+ star rating because we treat all our users with respect. We offer the same uniform level of technical support to all our users from across the world.

Purchasing our apps isn’t like purchasing a locally-made lunch or dinner, where everything from the raw ingredients, to the labor market that cooks the lunch, and the servers that bring it to you are adjusted to Purchasing Power Parity.

Researching data about Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) in every country (among 160+ countries!), then adjusting prices accordingly, and responding to fluctuating exchange rates is time-consuming. As an indie app developer, we simply do not have the resources to do this, and believe that our time is better spent building more features in our apps.

We build higher-end products, and our pricing that reflects that. We don’t want 10× as many users at 1/10th the price. We’d rather have fewer users that appreciate the value they are getting than users who want everything to be cheaper and cheaper.

You would typically use our apps for several hours a week. Yet, they’re cheaper than a sandwich anywhere around the world. For those who are unfortunately still unable to afford our apps, we offer a generous free feature tier so our users across the globe can use most features without paying anything.