Why doesn’t Revere offer a one-time purchase option?
This is a common question. Many people don’t like the idea of paying for something every month. I track my subscriptions in an app called Bobby and have 17 of them. I can understand why people prefer the one time payment. However, it’s not in their best interest for an app like Revere — let me explain.
Your relationships are built over a lifetime, so an app focused on building them should also last a lifetime. If it doesn’t, there’s an unpleasant moment in the future where all that information will be lost or need to be moved someplace else. This happens in software all the time: companies create a product, people use it, then the company goes out of business and all the users are left on their own.
Specifically in the case of relationship management apps like Revere, almost all of them either switch to focus on business users, or get abandoned. It’s not enough to have a good product, the business model must be sustainable too.
I use Revere everyday and have hundreds of notes in it, so I also want it to be around for my lifetime. I’m in the same boat as you, however I’m at the controls, so you depend on me making the right decisions to keep the app going, including the business model.
The nature of “Pay-once” business models is fundamentally flawed for software products. This is why you see every successful one requiring a subscription. Pay-once products get their money from new customers, so their focus must necessarily be on marketing and reaching new people, not building new features for existing ones.
SIDENOTE: There are apps that have pay-once plans but they: either create new versions requiring repurchasing every so often; charge hundreds of dollars once, essentially front-loading the subscription; or they are unsustainable and on a slow decline.
With a subscription model, the money comes from existing customers, so an app with as little as 1000 subscribers at $5/month can be a simple living for someone and keep going forever. Not only that, but an app maker using a subscription model is incentivized to build features the existing customers want, not spend money (and effort) marketing to new people.
There are other factors that make pay-once models unsustainable — like the economics of marketing which make the cost to finding a new customer higher than a customer is willing to pay for a product — and explain why there’s a graveyard of relationship management apps in the App Store.
I rather not add another subscription to my expenses either, but for products important to me, it gives me peace of mind when I see the makers thinking about the long-term. Hopefully this post gives you the same peace of mind for Revere.
