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· 7 min read · Philosophy

Why pay once in 2026? Discito's pricing philosophy

By the Discito team

Open the App Store, search any productivity category, and count the apps that don't have a subscription. You'll have time to count them, because there won't be many. The defaults of 2026 are: free download, gated features, $4.99/month or $39.99/year, autorenew on, and the cancel button buried two screens deep in Apple's subscription manager.

Discito costs $14.99 once. There's no monthly. There's no yearly. There's no "founder pricing" countdown timer. Once you buy, you own it forever, you can share it across your Family Sharing group, and the receipts work even if Discito the company stops existing tomorrow. Apple holds the lifetime entitlement, not us.

This isn't an accident, and it isn't a marketing trick. It's a deliberate bet that the subscription default is wrong for this category, and that "pay once, own forever" is the better deal for the user — and, surprisingly often, the better deal for the developer too. Here's the reasoning.

The PCalc test

James Thomson has been selling PCalc on the App Store for over a decade. PCalc is a calculator. It costs $9.99 once. There's an In-App Purchase model for new features, all of which are also one-time. It's been continuously updated, it's been an Apple Design Award winner, it pays James's bills, and it has never carried a subscription.

The category that's supposed to be "impossible to sell as a one-time purchase" — utility apps that should obviously be free — turns out to be perfectly viable when the developer ships software people want to own. PCalc is the existence proof. Pixelmator Pro, Tweetbot (RIP), Soulver, Mela, Things 3, Reeder, Halide, Ivory — every one of these is or was a successful one-time-purchase iOS app. The subscription default isn't a law of physics; it's a habit the industry picked up around 2017 and never reconsidered.

Discito's bet is that flashcard apps fit the PCalc test. We don't have ongoing infrastructure costs (no server — sync is via your iCloud account; AI runs on your iPhone, not on someone's GPU farm). We don't need recurring revenue to keep the lights on. We need enough customers to make the development time pay back, and after that we need to keep shipping good updates because we want to, not because we're trying to retain a subscription cohort.

The subscription default isn't a law of physics. It's a habit the industry picked up around 2017 and never reconsidered.

The math: what does $14.99 actually mean?

Look at what subscription study apps cost over a multi-year horizon vs. what Discito Pro costs over the same time:

And the comparison is conservative — subscription prices in this category have a long history of going up, and there's no structural reason any of them would stop. Discito Pro at $14.99 stays $14.99 unless we explicitly raise it, in which case your existing purchase is still good at the price you paid, because that's how Apple's non-consumable IAPs work.

Family Sharing is included; one purchase, up to six family members.

Why we don't do a free trial

The first version of Discito had a 7-day free trial of Pro. We took it out before launch. The reasoning was twofold:

One, trials in the App Store are coupled to subscriptions in users' heads. Show someone a "7-day free trial" button and the muscle memory is: great, I'll forget to cancel and end up paying $4.99/month forever, no thanks. The trial framing creates the wrong expectation for a one-time purchase. Even when the trial is honest, the cognitive overhead of "wait, will this auto-bill?" kills conversion.

Two, a generic trial of "everything in Pro for 7 days" doesn't actually answer the question the user is asking. The user isn't asking "is this app well-designed?" — they can tell that from the App Store screenshots. They're asking "does this specific feature work well for my specific use case?" — does the FSRS optimizer make my pharmacology cards better? Does AI generation produce usable cards from my biochem PDF? Does the lecture-audio flow handle my professor's accent?

Those are per-feature questions. So we built per-feature trials.

The trial counters: taste every Pro feature first

Discito Lite — the free tier — includes per-Apple-ID usage trials of every Pro feature that has any kind of "does this actually work for me?" question:

These counters live in NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore — Apple's per-Apple-ID key-value sync. They decrement on use, they never reset, and they follow you across devices but not across Apple IDs. Uninstall-and-reinstall doesn't reset them; signing into a different Apple ID does (which is a different person, so that's correct).

Once you buy Pro, every counter is bypassed unconditionally. Pro = unlimited everything, full stop. This isn't a "Pro tier with usage limits" model — it's a "free tier that lets you try every Pro feature exactly once before deciding" model. The trials are the honest version of "see if this works for you," scoped to the specific decisions you're trying to make.

What stays free, forever

The Lite tier isn't a stripped-down demo of Pro. It's a complete flashcard app that's free for as long as Apple lets us ship it on the App Store:

If you never buy Pro, Discito stays useful forever. That's the bar a free tier has to meet for this to be honest, rather than a long-form ad for the paid tier.

What's in Pro, then?

Pro is the features where there's a real, ongoing, "this took serious work to build and to ship correctly" weight behind them:

iCloud sync is free. We want to call this out explicitly because it's so often used as the "obvious" Pro-gate in other apps, and we think that's the wrong call: sync is what makes your data feel like yours, and putting it behind a paywall makes the free tier feel like a trap door. Discito's CloudKit-based sync works on every device, on every tier, forever.

The honest pitch

Try Discito Lite. It's a complete flashcard app. Use it for as long as you want. If you eventually hit a Pro feature you want — and you'll know which one, because the per-feature trials let you experience each one in your real workflow — buy Pro for $14.99 once, own it forever, share it with your family, and never see a subscription prompt.

If you never need Pro, you have a genuinely capable free flashcard app — unlimited cards, full FSRS-6, iCloud sync, and widgets, at no cost, forever. If you do want Pro, it's a single $14.99 purchase: one payment, owned for life, shared across your family. If we go out of business in 2030, your $14.99 entitlement still works (Apple holds the IAP receipt; the app keeps running) and your data is yours forever because it never left your iCloud account.

That's the deal. "Pay once, own forever. No subscription, ever." We mean it literally.

Try Discito

Discito Lite is free forever. Pro is $14.99 once, lifetime, Family Sharing included. Pay once, own forever.

Get on App Store Try Lite Free →

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Why we built Discito on FSRS-6 → Importing your existing flashcards → A 16-week solo build →