Open your phone's settings and look at your subscriptions. Go ahead — most people are surprised. A fitness app you used twice. A meditation app from January's resolution. A kids' game that's been renewing at $3.99/month since last summer.
Subscription fatigue isn't a buzzword anymore. It's the defining consumer frustration of the app economy. And yet, the industry keeps pushing subscriptions as the default model for everything — even apps that don't need ongoing server costs.
Why everything became a subscription
The shift to subscriptions accelerated around 2016 when Apple started offering developers a higher revenue share (85% vs 70%) for subscriptions that renew past the first year. The incentive was clear: recurring revenue is more predictable and more valuable than one-time purchases.
For apps with genuine ongoing costs — cloud storage, streaming content, server infrastructure, teams of content creators — subscriptions make sense. Spotify needs to pay artists. Notion needs to run servers. Figma needs to employ engineers.
But a flashlight app? A QR code scanner? A single-player game with no server? The subscription model is just rent-seeking. You're paying monthly for something that was built once and costs nothing to maintain.
The user perspective
The average American now spends over $900 per year on digital subscriptions. That's not counting physical subscriptions like meal kits or clothing boxes. Every new subscription is a small recurring decision — easy to start, easy to forget, hard to justify in aggregate.
One-time purchases are the opposite:
- You decide once. No "should I cancel?" anxiety every month.
- The price is the price. $4.99 today, $4.99 in 2028. It doesn't creep up.
- It's yours. You paid for it. It works. Even if the developer disappears, the app still runs on your device.
- Family sharing works simply. One purchase covers everyone on your family plan. No per-seat pricing.
The developer perspective
"But how do you sustain development without recurring revenue?" It's a fair question. Here's the honest answer: not every app needs to be a business that sustains a team of 20 people indefinitely.
A one-time purchase app can be profitable if:
- The app is finished. It ships complete, not as a "minimum viable product" that gets features dripped in over time.
- Server costs are zero or near-zero. Offline apps, local-only apps, and static-content apps qualify.
- Updates are enhancements, not necessities. Bug fixes and compatibility updates are manageable. You're not building new features every sprint to justify a renewal.
- Marketing is organic. Good apps get recommended. Word of mouth and App Store search are free.
The trade-off is real: you'll never have the recurring revenue charts that VCs love. But you also won't have churn rates to manage, cancellation flows to optimise, or the ethical discomfort of charging someone monthly for something they haven't opened since February.
The trust dividend
There's an underappreciated benefit to one-time pricing: trust. When someone sees "$4.99 — everything included, forever," they know exactly what they're getting. There's no asterisk, no "after free trial," no "basic tier" that's missing half the features.
That transparency generates goodwill. People leave better reviews. They recommend the app to friends. They feel good about the purchase instead of resentful about the charge.
Where we stand
Waiting Games is a one-time $4.99 purchase. Ten games, every cosmetic, every update — included. No ads, no subscriptions, no in-app purchases. It's an offline app with zero server costs, so there's no ongoing expense to pass on to users.
We're not anti-subscription. We're anti-subscription-where-it-doesn't-belong. A game that runs entirely on your device, with no cloud features and no content pipeline, should cost what it costs to build — once.
