The Journal

One-off or subscription: what you own when you pay for an app

Almost every app now charges by the month, and the reasons are mostly sound. A one-off purchase makes a different promise and carries a different risk. Here is what to check before you pay for anything, and why Barriers sells Premium once and subscribes only for Family.

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How monthly became the default

Software used to be bought. You paid a price, you got a version, and the next version cost money again. That was replaced almost everywhere by a monthly or yearly charge, and the reasons are not sinister.

Costs recur. A phone app has to be rebuilt for a new operating system every autumn, translated again each time it adds a language, and supported when something breaks. Anything with a server behind it carries a bill every month whether or not anyone buys the app that month. Money that arrives once does not match costs that arrive forever. Subscription solved a real problem, and it spread well beyond the software whose costs obviously recur.

The scale is now considerable. Setting out how the UK's new subscription rules will work, the Department for Business and Trade put the number of active subscriptions in the country at around 155 million. It estimated that 5.8 per cent of them are unwanted, which is about 9.7 million contracts and £1.6 billion a year, and that 3.6 million of those began as a free or discounted trial that rolled over into payment.

That last figure is what people mean by subscription fatigue. Much of it is not a story about mis-selling. It is a story about contracts nobody got round to ending.

A subscription buys access; a purchase buys the thing

The difference between the two models is not the price. It is what survives the day you stop paying.

A subscription sells access for a period, and when the period ends the access ends. That is the deal as written, and there is nothing underhand in it. Apple's own product definitions draw the line precisely: an auto-renewable subscription lets a customer buy content for a set period and "renews automatically unless cancelled by the user", while a non-consumable is "a product that is purchased once and does not expire or decrease with use". Apple's guidelines also tell developers they should have a restore mechanism for purchases that can be restored, which is how something bought once comes back on a new phone.

So the promise differs in one specific respect, and that respect is price. A one-off purchase has no next payment, so there is nothing to raise. The price can rise for the next buyer; it cannot rise for you. What buying once does not buy is permanence. An app can still be withdrawn from sale, or left to break on a new operating system, and that risk is dealt with further down.

It changes who has to be persuaded, too. A subscription has to be worth not cancelling. A one-off purchase has to be worth buying, to somebody new, every time. Those are different pressures, and neither is automatically the honest one.

The stores have written rules for the move from one model to the other. Apple's review guidelines tell a developer changing an existing app to a subscription that they "should not take away the primary functionality existing users have already paid for", and give the example of letting customers who had already paid for full access to a game keep it.

What "lifetime" usually means

It usually means the lifetime of the product, not the lifetime of the buyer. That is arithmetic rather than scandal: a lifetime deal is a company's bet that you will cost less to serve than you paid, and if the bet is wrong often enough the company stops, at which point every lifetime ends on the same afternoon.

The sharper question is not whether a price is one-off or monthly, but whether the thing you are buying runs on your device or on somebody else's computer. A one-off price for software that runs on your own phone is a durable promise: the code is on the device and it keeps working. A one-off price for a hosted service has to be funded indefinitely out of future sales, by people who have not bought anything yet. Honest one-off pricing tends to stop where the servers start.

Five questions before you subscribe to anything

These apply to any app, including this one.

What happens to your access when you stop? Does the app go read-only, allow an export and then close, or lock you out the same day? Find the answer before you start, not after.

What happens to your data? Look for an export in a format something else can read: CSV, JSON, a calendar file. In the UK you can ask a company for the personal data you provided, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format, where the processing is automated and rests on consent or a contract. That right is narrower than most people assume: it does not hand back your account, and it does not cover everything a company has worked out about you. A working export button is worth more than a legal right exercised by email.

Where does the data live? If the only copy is on the company's server, cancelling ends access to your records, not merely to features.

Is the trial a trial? Some are; some are the first month of a subscription with the charge deferred. Put the end date in your calendar on the day you start. In the government's estimate, more unwanted subscriptions came from trials rolling over than from any other cause it identified.

How do you cancel, and from where? A subscription bought inside an app is usually cancelled in your store account, not in the app: Apple's route runs through Settings, your name, then Subscriptions; Google's through the subscriptions list in Google Play, where a cancelled subscription runs to the end of the period already paid for.

Do not assume the law has caught up. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 will require reminder notices before renewal payments, cooling-off rights of fourteen days, and a straightforward way to end a contract, online where it was taken out online. The government expects that regime to commence in spring 2027. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission's 2024 click-to-cancel rule was vacated by a federal appeals court six days before its compliance date, and in March 2026 the Commission opened a fresh rulemaking by asking for comment on what should replace it. Until then, the checking is yours.

The honest case against buying once

One-off pricing funds ongoing development worse than subscription does. That is the reason most of the industry left it behind, and a reader deserves it stated plainly.

The money arrives once; the work does not stop. Next year's operating system will break something. Support costs are counted per person, not per sale. A company selling one-off purchases pays for that out of sales to new customers: this year's maintenance is funded by people who have not bought the app yet. If new sales fall, maintenance is the first thing to go quiet.

So the real risk to a one-off buyer is not a surprise charge. It is an app that still opens and stops changing. Subscription businesses have a genuine answer to that problem, which is why so many of them give it.

The argument on the other side is narrower than marketing usually suggests. A company living on new sales cannot coast on inertia, because nobody forgets to cancel a purchase they already made. It has to be worth buying tomorrow, to a stranger. That is a discipline, not a guarantee.

How Barriers charges, and why it is split

Barriers is a household planner for tasks, money and receipts, made by IV Technologies Ltd, a UK company. It charges in three different ways on purpose, and the dividing line is the one above.

The task list is free and unlimited, forever. It needs no account.

Premium, which opens the money side of the app, is a one-off purchase that never renews. Finance and Receipts are free to try for fourteen days; after that you buy the feature once and keep it. There is no next payment, so there is nothing for us to raise and nothing for you to forget to cancel.

Family, which is sharing a household online with other people, is a subscription, and the only one. It is the part with a server behind it: accounts, invitations, other people's devices kept in step. That cost recurs every month, so the charge does too. A first household is free. A second is part of Family.

There are no ads and no tracking. The app contains no analytics SDK, and the usage analytics it does have are off until you switch them on. It is paid for by the people who choose to pay for it, and by nobody else.

None of that makes one model better than the other. Subscription is a legitimate way to sell software, and we use it where the costs really are monthly. The point worth taking to any app, not only this one: decide what you want to be left holding on the day you stop paying, and pay accordingly.

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