Almost every habit tracker on the stores today asks for money every month. Some ask for money every week, which is a strange thing to do for an app that draws squares on a calendar.
We went the other way with Habit Observer. There is a free version, and there is one payment that unlocks the rest, forever. No monthly plan, no yearly plan, no trial that quietly converts.
I want to explain that decision honestly, including the part where it is worse for us.
What the user actually gets
The free app tracks three habits. That is not a crippled demo, it is a usable app. Most people who try a habit tracker are trying to fix one thing, maybe two, and they abandon the app within a week either way. Asking them for a card number before they know if the habit sticks is bad manners.
If they stay, one payment unlocks the full board. The price is whatever the store shows in their own currency, and after that the app stops asking for anything ever again.
Two smaller things matter more than they sound:
It survives a new phone. Buy it, lose the phone, buy a new phone, restore. No support ticket, no receipt hunting.
It works with no internet. Once it is unlocked, the app never phones home to ask whether you are still allowed to use what you paid for. There is nothing to check, because there is no server that knows you exist.
That second one is the piece I am most attached to. A subscription needs a server that remembers who you are and whether you have paid this month. The moment such a server exists, your habit data becomes something worth putting next to it. We would rather not build the server at all.
What it costs us
Here is the part the marketing version of this article would skip.
A subscription earns more. Not slightly more, several times more over the life of a user who forgets to cancel. The whole industry moved to subscriptions because the numbers are not close. When we sell one unlock, we get paid once and then keep working on the app for years with nothing arriving.
There is no recurring revenue to plan against. Income from a one-time app is a sawtooth: a small bump when a new version or a new language ships, then decay. You cannot hire against that, and you cannot promise a roadmap against it either.
Support is free forever. Someone who paid once in 2026 and writes us an email in 2029 is entitled to an answer, and they will get one, and that email costs more than they paid.
And there is a sneaky one: we have to keep the price low. A one-time unlock has to feel small enough to buy without thinking, which caps what we can charge for years of work. A subscription can be two dollars a month, which everyone accepts and which is far more than we will ever ask for outright.
So this is not a clever business trick. It is a choice we can afford because our apps are small, we build them fast, and we do not carry a server bill for each user.
When a subscription is the right answer
I am not going to argue that subscriptions are always wrong. They are not.
If the product costs money to run per user, a subscription is the only honest model. Anything that syncs across devices through someone’s infrastructure, anything that does real work on a machine you do not own, anything with a content library that has to be licensed again each year. In those cases a one-time payment means either the service dies or the early buyers get subsidised by the late ones. Both are worse than a monthly bill.
The dishonest version is what annoys people: a subscription on an app that runs entirely on the phone, does nothing on a server, and would work identically if you paid once. That is not paying for a service. That is paying rent on software that is sitting in your pocket doing the work itself.
Habit Observer is in the second group. It stores your habits on your phone, draws your streaks on your phone, and sends your reminders from your phone. There is no monthly cost to pass on to you. So we do not invent one.
The ceiling is a real limit, and we kept it
One honest detail about the paid version. The board holds seven habits, and that is the maximum for everyone, including people who paid. PRO does not mean unlimited.
That is a deliberate design constraint rather than a pricing trick. A habit tracker with forty habits in it is a task manager wearing a costume, and nobody completes forty daily habits. But it does mean the paid tier gives you less than “unlimited” would, and I would rather say that here than have someone discover it after paying.
If you want to run your whole life out of a list, that is a different app.
What this buys us instead of money
Trust, mostly, and it compounds slower than revenue but it does not churn.
People who look for apps that do not track them are a small audience and they talk to each other. They read the permission list. They notice when an app has no account screen. They notice when nothing on the pricing page is designed to confuse them. Getting that group to recommend you is worth more to a studio our size than squeezing another few euros a year out of someone who forgot they were paying.
It also keeps the app simple in a way that shows up in the code. No entitlement server, no receipt validation service, no subscription state machine, no grace periods, no dunning emails. Every one of those is a thing that can break and lock a paying user out of their own data on a Sunday evening. We do not have them, so they cannot break.
The tradeoff is real and it is not in our favour financially. We are fine with it. An app you bought once and can still open in five years with no network connection is the product I actually want to sell, and it turns out you cannot sell that on a monthly plan.