One-Time or Subscription: How We Priced TextPack and Flowo

The rule we used

We chose each pricing model by asking one question: after the sale, does serving this customer keep costing us money. A product with no cost per use can be sold once. A product with a cost per use needs income that continues while the use continues.

We run two products that give opposite answers. TextPack is a Mac app that turns text or Markdown into a PDF, and it does that on the person's own machine. Flowo is a day planner for iPhone and Android, and several of its features send a request to a cloud AI service through our backend.

TextPack: one payment

TextPack Pro costs $9.99 once, with no recurring charge. Editing, preflight checks, preview and export all happen locally, and document text is not uploaded for those operations. Our cost for a customer who exports a thousand documents is the same as for a customer who exports ten.

The free version has no time limit. Its terms set the difference from Pro in four lines:

• Free allows 3 exports per day, and Pro has no export limit.
• Free includes 2 document templates, and Pro includes all 7.
• Free adds a TextPack watermark to PDF exports, and Pro removes it.
• Pro adds custom branding and typography controls.

Free and Pro are the same public download. A purchase sends a license key by email, and entering the key in the app turns on Pro. The app does make network requests for license activation, revalidation and update checks, and those are small next to a cost that grows with every use.

A one-time price has a consequence we accept. Income arrives when someone buys and does not repeat. TextPack's scope is stated on its site in the same plain terms: no collaboration, and export to PDF, Markdown and TXT.

Flowo: a subscription and a lifetime purchase

Flowo is free to download, and Flowo Pro starts at US$7.99 a month. The monthly and yearly plans begin with a 14-day free trial, and the store shows the local price and terms before any charge.

The trial is an introductory offer run by the App Store or Google Play. Our backend grants no trial of its own. To the app, a person in a trial holds the same Pro entitlement as a paying subscriber, with a period type that says trial, and the app reads the days remaining from it.

A lifetime purchase is sold alongside the two subscriptions. It is a non-consumable product attached to the same entitlement, so every feature check treats it exactly like a subscription. It carries no trial, because the store offers trials on subscriptions only. It also has no expiry date, and the code that looks for a lapsed subscription skips it for that reason.

The lifetime purchase is the one place where our rule bends. The cost of that customer's AI requests continues after the single payment, and the backend's daily ceilings apply to a lifetime customer as they do to a subscriber.

What stays free in Flowo

Flowo's free tier keeps every paid feature available in a smaller amount. Each AI feature has a weekly allowance that refills at the start of the ISO week, on Monday.

• AI plans, where a task is broken into steps or a day is laid out: 7 a week.
• Recovery, where the app applies a new plan after the day has changed: 7 a week.
• Braindump Tidy, the AI sort of captured notes: 5 a week. Writing notes is never counted.
• Mentor conversations: 3 a week.
• Subtasks: 2 levels of nesting.

Two daily ceilings sit above these and come from the backend. Cloud AI text requests are limited to 10 a day on Free and 30 a day on Pro. Voice notes are limited to 3 a day on every plan. Voice is a cost control and is never sold, so paying does not raise it.

We chose a weekly allowance over a hard lock after the trial. A person who never touches a feature again forgets what it did, and a few uses a week keep it familiar. The paywall then appears on the day someone reaches for the feature one more time than usual.

The weekly numbers and the nesting depth can be changed from the store offering's metadata without an app release. The values compiled into the app are the fallback, and a missing or malformed value from the dashboard is ignored.

How the paywall states the price

Every price on Flowo's paywall is the string the store returns for that person's country and currency. The app does not format or convert the main price itself.

The yearly plan shows two derived figures. The per-month figure is the yearly price divided by twelve, formatted in the store's currency. The saving is the percentage difference between the yearly price and twelve months of the monthly price, rounded and held between 0 and 99.

Plans appear in a fixed order: yearly, then monthly, then lifetime. If the dashboard exposes a package the app does not recognise, the app still lists it without a badge. Hiding a purchasable plan from a buyer is the worse error.

When nothing can be bought

Every purchase gate in Flowo lets the action through when there is nothing to sell. If the store returned no plans, or the build was compiled with monetization off, the gate records that it was reached and the feature runs. Our article on rate limiting covers the server side of this.

The same rule applies to storage. The weekly counter is kept in local preferences, and a failed read or write grants the use. A broken counter must never lock a feature the app is sold on.

What we chose not to sell

Flowo has one paid tier. The code also contains two narrower bundles, one for the planning features and one for the note and mentor features, each wired to its own entitlement check. Neither is attached to any offering, so no paywall can sell them.

We left them off sale on purpose. With the bundles and per-feature prices added, a buyer would face nine purchase options, and we judged that one tier with three ways to pay is easier to understand.

The decision is cheap to reverse. The checks already read the bundle entitlements, so selling a bundle would be a store and dashboard change.