One time purchase apps are about to have their moment (again)?

People are fed up with app subscriptions. I'm certainly feeling a growing sense of subscription fatigue over the past few years. I love a good app though, and fully believe developers should reap the rewards from making good apps, but I do also see a fight on the horizon.

As much as I hold some reservations around AI, we cannot ignore that generative AI is getting better at making small and highly tailored apps. We're at a point now where for some apps, let's say a habit tracker, it would be worth spending a few hours of your time vibe coding it, instead of paying £60+ a year for one. Heck, I managed to use the free version of Claude in one evening to create a private habit tracker to a genuinely usable standard.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of risk and some additional effort around vibe coded apps; notably security and information protection, performance, maintainability, and having to self-host the app. For the average consumer though, they're not concerned or aware enough of the risks, and the rewards of cutting down some of those monthly subscriptions are worth the trials and tribulations.

People will start to find that they're able to create a few custom apps with exactly the functionality they want. And we've all been through the cycle of trying to find a todo app that will make you more productive. You know as well as I do that there's always something missing or not quite right about each one and you either end up back where you started, or worse trying to bend one to your will (reader: the app will never work how you want). Vibe code your own however and it'll do what you want, for a lot less money too!

Vibe coding something still takes time and effort though, and we can get stuck in loops of whack-a-mole bug fixes with it, or see the code base grow to a point where it's too unwieldy for the AI to handle. This is where it's important to remember the strong human instinct of wanting to find the easy way to do something almost every time. Enter our hero one time purchase app stage left. "Pay for me once, I do the job you want and only hit your credit card once, plus you can stop fighting with that vibe coding". I'd say this is quite appealing, especially to a less technically or code minded individual.

Apps like the iOS / macOS productivity app Things are one time purchase and now a very rare sight on app stores, but it appears to be doing well. I like it primarily because it's a nice app, secondly because it's a one time purchase (with additional one time purchases for the Mac and iPad apps). More impressively, there's a cloud sync service built in to Things that is provided for free. Things is a demonstration that doing an app well and using the one time purchase model can work really well.

There are obvious exceptions, some apps provide functionality or processing that cost the developer money and cannot be done on-device. If that functionality is truly delivering value to the end customer, then it is of course reasonable to collect a monthly fee for that. This is where we get into the weeds of everyone believing their subscription offering does provide high levels of uniqueness and value, and that's a debate for another day.

Revenue doesn't need to stop once you've released the app, you can still release new versions occasionally (again, thinking about the Things model), and provide it as a paid upgrade for existing customers, maybe with a discount as a sweetener, and loyal customers who enjoy the app will probably go ahead and upgrade most times. Equally there is benefit to a customer that doesn't wish to or cannot afford to upgrade, they still have a functioning app and don't lose out on their investment.

I believe developers of apps will stand a chance against vibe coded apps if they continue to produce apps good at serving a niche, but at a reasonable (to the developer and the customer) one off cost price point instead of a subscription, hitting a sweet spot that stops me dialling up Claude and rolling my own.