Are We Building
a Subscription Plan?

This question comes up more than almost anything else we hear about pricing. Are you ever going to offer a subscription. The short answer is yes, we are looking at it seriously. The longer answer is that we have not shipped it, and we would rather tell you exactly why than stay quiet about it.

The lifetime license is not going anywhere

All-in-One stays exactly what it is today. A one time investment, not a monthly bill. That part is not up for debate, and nothing here changes it. If we ever do build a subscription option, it will sit next to the lifetime license as a second choice, not replace it.

About that word, SaaS

If we ever ship this, someone will probably describe it as us moving toward SaaS. Software as a service. It is worth saying plainly that we do not love the term, and it is worth noticing why. Go look at the pricing page of almost any serious software company, the ones actually running this model well, and you will rarely find them calling themselves that in their own words. SaaS is a label written about companies from the outside, by analysts and journalists sorting the market into categories. It is not usually a label a company reaches for on its own homepage.

That does not mean the underlying idea is not worth taking seriously. Centrally hosted, reached through a browser, paid for as you go, updated without you having to ask for it. Those are real tradeoffs, and real advantages for some operators, whatever word ends up on the label. We are happy to think hard about the pattern itself. We are just not going to suddenly start using a word in our own marketing that nobody selling real software actually uses in theirs.

Why we have not answered yet

Pricing itself is the easier half of this problem. We could work out a fair monthly number without too much trouble. The harder half, the part we genuinely have not solved to our own satisfaction, is what happens to your data and your access on the day you stop paying.

With the lifetime license, the platform is installed on your own server, under your own domain, and your data never passes through our infrastructure. That is true on day one and it stays true forever, because there is no ongoing payment tied to it at all. Nothing about your access depends on a bill going through next month.

A subscription changes that shape completely. If access depends on payments continuing, we owe you a real, detailed answer before we write a single line of billing code. What happens to your shipments, your customer records, your financial history, the day a subscription lapses. Does the system freeze in place exactly as it was. Do you keep read only access so you can still see everything. Do you get a full export automatically, with no request needed on your side.

Your data belongs to you the day you sign, and every day after. A subscription only ships once we can promise that stays true on the day you stop paying too.

What we are actually weighing

Two things need real answers before this goes anywhere near production. A pricing model that is genuinely fair for a lower upfront cost, without quietly costing more over a few years than the lifetime license would have. And a data handling policy that protects an operator exactly as well as the lifetime license already does, even after they stop paying. Both need to be real, published answers. Not fine print somebody finds out about later, at the worst possible time.

Where this stands

We are still figuring this out. That sentence is not a placeholder while we quietly finish the real work somewhere else. It is the actual current status. When we have real answers to both questions, the pricing and what happens to your data, we will publish them here in the same amount of detail as this post.

We would rather take longer and get this right than ship a subscription plan we would need to quietly patch six months later. If you are curious how any of this might apply to your specific operation, that is exactly the kind of question worth raising in a private demo, even while we are still working through it.