Why my apps have a lifetime option
Every competitor in this category bills recurring, most of them weekly. I offer that too, and a way out of it, and here is the whole reasoning, including the part that argues against me.
When a subscription is honest
Recurring pricing fits recurring cost. If an app runs servers on your behalf, stores your data, syncs it between devices, or answers requests, it costs the developer money every month you use it, and a monthly fee matches that exactly.
Email, storage, streaming, anything collaborative — a subscription is the right shape there, and the alternative is a company that quietly dies.
Why it fits a cleaner badly
Sift runs entirely on your phone. No server receives anything, no account exists, no storage is held anywhere. Once I have built it, one more customer costs me nothing at all.
And the job itself is occasional. You clean a phone when it is full, which is a few times a year. Charging weekly for something you use quarterly is charging for the gap.
That is exactly why the category’s pricing works the way it does: $5.99 a week is $311 a year, it reads as small, and it survives being forgotten. None of that is about the software.
What I charge
Here is the actual menu:
| Option | Price | For |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $4.99 | Trying it, or a one-off clear-out |
| Yearly | $29.99 | Half the monthly rate |
| Lifetime | $79.99 | Never thinking about it again |
Scanning and seeing everything Sift finds is free. You pay to act on it.
The honest counter-argument
Lifetime pricing has a real problem, and I would rather name it myself than let you find it.
A lifetime purchase funds development once and obliges me to support it forever. Every OS release breaks something; every year of new devices needs testing. Apps sold that way tend to end up abandoned, or quietly relaunched as a new app you have to buy again — which is just a subscription with worse manners.
My answer is that the recurring tiers fund the ongoing work, and lifetime is priced at sixteen months of monthly, so it is not so steep a discount that it undermines the thing paying for maintenance. If I have that balance wrong, the failure mode is the one above, and you would be right to hold it against me.
What I will not do
- Weekly billing. It exists to be hard to add up.
- Selling data. There is none to sell; nothing leaves the device.
- Paywalling the scan. You see what is there before deciding.
- Removing what you bought. The original $19.99 one-time purchase still unlocks the app, permanently, for everyone who bought it.
That last one is not generosity, honestly. Dropping a retired product id from the entitlement check would silently un-purchase people who paid me, and shipping that would say more about me than any pricing page.
Sift — Clean up photo storage. See what it does →