Why Moji Is a One-Time Purchase

Every other read-it-later app charges monthly. Moji is $9.99 once.

The default is monthly because that's what apps do now. Instapaper does it. Readwise does it. The established read-it-later apps all do it. If you set out today to build one, the path of least resistance is a subscription tier.

I had to think about why I shouldn't just follow that path. The question that broke it for me was simple: what does Moji actually do with your money each month? It has no servers. The summarization model runs on your phone, not mine. Sync uses your iCloud, not mine. The image cache lives on your device. There is no per-user infrastructure I have to keep running. A subscription wouldn't fund the cost of serving you. It would fund my time to keep working on the app — which is real, but isn't the same thing.

The moment you set up an app as a subscription, the incentives shift. Churn becomes the metric you watch. You start asking yourself what would keep someone paying through the next billing cycle, and the answers are usually the same: push notifications about things they didn't ask for, "streaks" that punish them for not opening the app, a feed of suggested articles that turns a quiet utility into something noisier. None of that is what I want Moji to be. But if my livelihood depended on monthly retention, those things would start looking reasonable.

One-time pricing keeps the deal honest. I'm paid for shipping the app you actually want — once, when you decide it's worth it — not for finding ways to make leaving expensive.

Caveats

I won't pretend this is free of cost on my end. No recurring revenue is real. If iOS 30 someday requires a major rewrite, I'll probably ship that as a separate paid app, the way Tot and Mela did when their authors decided a clean version was worth charging for again. The current price will go up, too. Early users get the cheaper price, and it climbs as the app gets more capable. That's the honest version of "pay once": pay once for what's there now, knowing what's there now will keep growing without billing you again for it.

The reason I think most apps that charge monthly shouldn't is that subscriptions made sense when software was a service running on someone's infrastructure. Hosted file sync, cloud databases, anything that costs the developer per-user dollars to keep alive — sure, charge monthly. For an app that lives on your phone with your iCloud, the original deal still works fine. Moji is one of those.