Apps you own vs. apps you rent: the case against another subscription
Most iPhone tools now charge every month, forever. Here's the honest math on one-time purchases, and the small family of apps built the other way.
There's a quiet tax on your home screen. The flashlight is free, but the note-taking app is $3 a month. The habit tracker is $40 a year. The PDF app wants $10 a month to let you sign a form. None of it is expensive on its own. Added up, you're renting a dozen small tools you'll never own, forever.
We build the other way. This is the reasoning behind that, laid out plainly — including where a subscription genuinely is the fairer deal, because sometimes it is.
Why so many apps became subscriptions
Subscriptions won for real reasons, not just greed. A one-time purchase has to fund years of iOS updates, bug fixes, and support from a payment you collected once. For an app with ongoing server costs — syncing your data across devices, running features in the cloud, storing your files — recurring revenue matches recurring cost. That's honest.
The trouble is that the model spread to apps that have no ongoing cost. A habit tracker that stores everything on your phone isn't paying a server bill for you. When it charges monthly anyway, you're not covering a cost — you're renting access to software that would run fine if you'd simply bought it.
The two questions that tell you which is fair
Before you subscribe to anything, ask:
- Does this app run a service for me, or just run on my phone? If your data lives on a server the company pays for every month — real-time sync, cloud storage, a web app, collaboration — a subscription is defensible. If everything happens on your device, there's no monthly cost to pass on.
- What happens when I stop paying? With a fair one-time app, you keep what you bought. With many subscriptions, the app becomes read-only or locks you out entirely — you rented, and the lease is up.
The trade-off, honestly
Buy-once isn't free of downsides, and pretending otherwise would be the same salesmanship we're trying to avoid.
| Subscription | Buy once | |
|---|---|---|
| Ongoing cloud sync, collaboration | Well-suited | Usually not offered |
| Your data on someone's server | Common | Rare by design |
| Cost over five years | Adds up | Paid once |
| Incentive to keep shipping | Strong (they need renewals) | Weaker (they already have your money) |
| What you keep if you stop paying | Often nothing | Everything |
That fourth row is the real knock on buy-once, and it's fair: a developer paid once has less reason to keep improving. Our answer is the family below — one purchase unlocks every app we make, so we're paid when we ship the next useful thing, not when we renew your access to the last one.
How Kraft is built
Every Kraft app follows the same rules. Your data stays on your device. There's no account to make and no server of ours holding your information. Each app is free to try, and one purchase — called Patron — unlocks the full version of every app in the family, on every device signed into your Apple ID. You can pay once and own it, or pay monthly if you'd rather; there's no lock-in either way.
Three apps live under it today:
- Tend — a habit tracker where your iPhone counts the reps instead of trusting a checkbox. Free for two habits with every feature; Patron lifts the limit.
- Pocket PDF — scan, sign, redact, merge, and summarize PDFs entirely on your phone. Scanning and your library are free.
- RacePep — friends record short pep talks that play at each mile of your race. A 5K or 10K is free.
None of them will email you a renewal notice, because none of them renew. If a monthly fee is the right deal for how you work, plenty of good apps offer one. If you'd rather own the small tools on your phone, that's what we make.