Shipping an app without a subscription — the case for pay-per-use

Shipping an app without a subscription was the pricing decision I agonized over longest while building Hiroi, my solo iOS meeting translator. The answer I landed on: no subscription. The first hour is free; after that it's prepaid time packs (from ¥600), you spend only the seconds you actually use, and the hours you buy never expire.

Recurring billing is the most sensible revenue model for a solo developer — predictable, stable, the safe choice. Here's why I turned it down anyway, written as honestly as I can. Maybe it's useful whether you're comparing app pricing as a user, or thinking through your own indie app monetization.

Subscription fatigue is real now

Start with how I feel as a user: there are too many subscriptions.

Video, music, storage, notes — even the weather app is monthly now. Each is only a few dollars, but stacked on one statement they add up, and the mounting monthly bill quietly wears you down. You get charged in months you barely opened the app; forget to cancel and you keep paying into silence. I didn't want to add one more line to that statement with my own app.

It's worse for a language or translation tool, where there's always a month you barely touched it. Getting billed in exactly that month plants a small resentment — and that resentment slowly sours how someone feels about the app itself. I didn't want to build that with my own hands.

Meetings come in waves

Then there's the nature of the tool. Meetings are uneven.

Some weeks are wall-to-wall calls with an overseas team; some months are all internal meetings where you never speak a word of English. You lean on it hard around a business trip, then not at all for three weeks. Charging a flat monthly fee for something used that unevenly simply doesn't line up.

If usage varies, the price should vary too. Heavy months cost more, quiet months cost nothing. Pay per use — you pay for what you draw — felt far more honest for this kind of tool. Like a utility: you pay for what comes out of the tap. That fits an irregular thing like meetings.

Only what you use — and it never expires

That's how the time packs came to be. You buy time up front, and it ticks down only by the seconds you actually run a translation. Don't use it, and it doesn't move.

And here's the one deliberately unusual call: the hours you buy never expire.

Most credit-based apps put a clock on what you purchase — gone in a few months, no rollover past the end of the month. That's a subscription wearing a different coat. A balance that expires just breeds a different anxiety: use it or lose it. That's the same dread as subscription fatigue in another outfit.

So I dropped the expiry. When a stretch of meetings finally lands six months from now, the time you bought earlier is simply still there. There's no reason to rush and burn it. This isn't just a spec — it's me saying go at your own pace. I wanted the reassurance of a one-time purchase — what you bought is yours — carried into a consumable balance.

The honest cost of shipping an app without a subscription

It wouldn't be fair to write only the noble version, so here's the underside.

Dropping the subscription means giving up recurring revenue — the MRR that lands automatically every month. It makes the business far harder to forecast, and it's a weak chart to show anyone. For a solo dev living off savings, recurring billing was genuinely the safer path.

I chose pay-per-use with no expiry anyway because I wanted to take that difference in trust instead. Never charged when you didn't use it; a balance that never vanishes — I believe those small reassurances, compounded, are why someone keeps an app for years. Short-term predictability versus long-term trust: if I can only have one while building alone, I'll take the latter. That's a trade-off I decided to carry.

(This "choosing by subtraction" runs through the feature I spent the most time on and then cut and what remains when translation is free, too.)

One technical note. iOS consumables have no "restore." Left alone, your balance would vanish on a new phone or a reinstall — unacceptable — so it's mirrored server-side, keyed to your Apple account. Switch phones, reinstall, and the time you bought comes back. Having promised it never expires, that was one promise I had to keep absolutely.

How Hiroi is priced

To sum up: Hiroi has no subscription. The first hour is free. After that, time packs from ¥600, spent only by the seconds you use, never expiring. No audio is recorded; transcripts and your study deck stay on your device. Only what you use, at your own pace.

For a solo dev, shipping an app without a subscription may well be the long way around. But if it can bring a user's guilt about the price down to zero, the detour is worth it — that's where I've landed for now.

If you'd like a look, it's at hiroi.app, and I write more of these backstage notes on X at @hiroi_app.

May the time you paid for stay truly yours.