Why Stiva has no subscription

Subscription fatigue is a real thing. And it makes sense, up to a point, because plenty of software genuinely benefits from the model: cloud services, collaborative tools, anything that involves ongoing infrastructure and real recurring costs.

But somewhere along the way, even small utility apps started charging monthly fees. Apps with no backend. Apps with no recurring operational costs. Apps that just run on your phone and do a thing.
When I started working on Stiva, I decided I wanted to think carefully about this.

The subscription trap

I get why subscriptions are tempting for developers. Predictable revenue is genuinely valuable, especially for solo projects. It smooths out the financial ups and downs, makes planning easier, and keeps the lights on.

But from a user's perspective, a subscription for a read-later app asks for a strange kind of trust. You're committing to a recurring charge for something you might use heavily for three months and then barely touch for six.
And the app doesn't get dramatically better month after month.
The ongoing cost doesn't feel matched to ongoing value delivered.

More than that, I kept thinking about ownership. When I save an article to Stiva, I want it to feel like mine. My library, my annotations, my reading history.
A subscription model quietly converts that feeling into a rental.
Stop paying, and the relationship ends.

A different bet: pay per major version

So I landed on something simpler. Saving, reading, and organizing your library in Stiva is free. Premium capabilities are a one-time unlock per major version.

You unlock Premium for Stiva 1. Those features are yours forever, including every update, bug fix, and improvement released during its lifecycle.

When Stiva 2 ships with genuinely new premium capabilities, unlocking them is a new choice. You're not forced to upgrade.
Because there is only one Stiva app on your phone, you will still download the update, but the new V2 features will remain locked:

• If your unlocked version 1 features do everything you need, they keep working exactly as they did.
• If version 2 offers something worth paying for, you can decide that's a fair trade.

It's a model with roots in how desktop software used to work, before the subscription wave hit everything.

It's more complicated than it sounds

I won't pretend this model is simple to build.
Technically, it means managing multiple entitlement tiers simultaneously: a version 1 purchaser and a version 2 purchaser sitting in the same user base, with the app behaving correctly for both, serving each exactly what they're entitled to, no more, no less.

In practice, this means no messy app migrations: everyone keeps the same app, everyone gets the same performance updates under the hood, but the app simply unlocks only the major features you've paid for.
That's non-trivial plumbing, and it only gets more intricate as major versions accumulate.

There's also a psychological complexity on my end: with subscriptions, revenue is relatively steady. With this model, revenue is event-driven.
It spikes when a new major version ships, then levels off.
That creates real pressure to keep shipping, not fake pressure, not manufactured urgency, but the genuine kind that comes from knowing your business depends on it.

Why that pressure is actually healthy

Here's the thing, though: I think that pressure is good.

A subscription model creates a subtle but real misalignment. Once you've captured recurring revenue, the incentive to dramatically improve the product weakens. Your income doesn't depend on shipping breakthroughs, it depends on not making people angry enough to cancel.

The major version model inverts this. My next meaningful revenue event only happens when I ship something worth paying for. Not worth keeping, worth upgrading to.
That's a meaningfully higher bar. It forces me to ask, genuinely: has this changed enough to earn money again?

I find that question clarifying. It strips away the incremental tweaks that look like progress without delivering it, and focuses attention on the kind of improvements that actually change how you use the app. New major versions should feel like new chapters, not the same story with small edits.

What this means for you

If you decide to pay for Stiva's Premium features, you're paying for something that stays yours.

When I ship major new versions, your app will update just like normal and you'll get to see what's new. If what I've built sounds useful, you can decide to pay to unlock those new capabilities. If it doesn't, no hard feelings, your existing features keep working exactly as they always have, right inside the same app.

It's a model built on the belief that software should earn money by delivering value.
I think that's a fair deal. I hope you do too.

Stiva is currently in closed beta and getting close to a public release. If you want to try it before launch, you can join the testing phase at stiva.app.