Productivity apps without the expensive subscription

The sum nobody does

It is worth adding up, once, what your productivity desk costs per year. A task app, a notes app, a habit tracker, maybe a calendar. Five to ten euros a month each sounds like nothing; the four together clear two hundred euros a year without much effort.

There is nothing scandalous about that. It’s software you use every day and somebody maintains it. But it is a number almost nobody has calculated, because subscriptions are designed not to be noticed. They charge themselves, in different months, in small amounts.

The useful question isn’t “is this expensive?”. It’s “what exactly am I paying for?”

Why nearly everything went subscription

It wasn’t a conspiracy, it was arithmetic.

An app used to be sold once and maintained forever. Every year the operating system moves: new screen sizes, new permissions, features withdrawn, a language that keeps evolving. Keeping an app current costs continuous work, and a one-time payment funds continuous work for precisely zero years.

The app stores didn’t help either: for a long time there was simply no way to charge for a major upgrade. That left two exits — ship a brand-new app every two years, or subscribe — and subscription won.

So subscriptions in themselves aren’t the problem. The problem is a subscription that doesn’t correspond to anything.

What you are actually paying for

When a fee is high, the money almost never goes into “more features”. It goes to three places.

Servers. If the app syncs through its own account, stores your files, offers real-time collaboration or has a web version, there are machines running every day of the year. That cost grows with every user and never falls. It is by far the largest line.

Staff. Design, development, support, marketing, admin. A thirty-person company needs to bill considerably more than a three-person one, and that shows up in the price even when the products look similar.

Acquisition. Advertising, sponsorships, affiliate programmes, permanent discounts. In parts of consumer software, winning a customer costs more than serving them for a year.

None of that is illegitimate. But it’s worth knowing that inside a high fee, the share attributable to the program in your hand is usually the smallest one.

When the expensive subscription is the right call

There are clear cases where paying more is simply sensible, and it’s only fair to say so.

If you work in a team and need to see the same projects at the same time, somebody has to run that infrastructure. If you depend on integrations with twenty external services, each one needs maintaining whenever the other side changes its API. If you need fast support or contractual guarantees, those are people. And if the tool makes you money, arguing over a hundred euros a year is wasted time.

The expensive subscription becomes a bad buy when you’re paying for infrastructure you don’t use: third-party cloud sync for a single user, collaboration for one person, a web version you never open.

Five questions before you subscribe

They apply to any app, ours included.

1. How much of this fee is infrastructure I actually use? If the app syncs through your own iCloud account and has no web version and no collaboration, the honest answer is “not much”.
2. What happens to my data if I stop paying? Can I still read it? Can I export it? Into a format that works elsewhere, or an invented one?
3. How long is the trial, and is it a real trial? Seven days is not enough to know whether an organisation system suits you: systems are judged when a bad week arrives, and that takes longer than seven days to show up.
4. Can the price sustain the app? An unsustainably low price is not good news either: it means the price rises or the app gets abandoned.
5. What else does it take from me besides money? Usage analytics, advertising identifiers, data shared with third parties. A “cheap” app funded by your data isn’t cheap — you’re just paying in a different currency.

WOPR’s own numbers, for reference

We can put Olena at €4.99 a year because the studio’s costs are very low, and that isn’t a trick: it’s a consequence of specific decisions.

There are no servers. Your data lives on the device and syncs through your private iCloud container, which you already pay Apple for. No servers means no monthly infrastructure bill — the line that pushes almost every high fee upwards.

There is no analytics and there are no third parties. Nothing is collected, so there is nothing to maintain, nothing to audit and nothing to explain.

The studio is small. A team with very low costs can build big things and charge little for them, because it doesn’t have to sustain a structure before it sustains a product.

And the trial runs 365 days, precisely because of question three: a year includes your bad weeks, your holidays and your January. If you aren’t using it after that, you shouldn’t be paying for it.

What you won’t find in Olena is collaboration, shared boards or a web version. Not for lack of time — it is the exact flip side of having no servers. If you need those things, there are apps on the market that do them very well, and they cost what it costs to do them.