I'm always interested in new ways to handle billing/subscriptions/etc and this is a cool change.<p>I recently heard of a payment strategy that I liked a lot though I understand it's hard to explain to customers. John Siracusa's Hyperspace [0] app has the following options:<p>* Monthly, recurring<p>* Monthly, one-time<p>* Yearly, recurring<p>* Monthly, one-time<p>* Lifetime, one-time<p>More details in the developer's own words here [1]. The interesting options are the Monthly and Yearly one-time options. For anyone in the Apple ecosystem you can technically get this behavior by purchasing a subscription and immediately cancelling it (since you will get the full time period you paid for still). But I really like this payment style especially for an app like this where I don't want to pay-per-use (that feel punitive) but I don't really have ongoing data-deduplication needs (at least the features the product currently offers). It's a "once every year or so" and I might need to run it multiple times on different directories/different settings.<p>"Time-based unlocks" might be a better way to think about it. There are lots of products I would 1000000% pay for 1 month of, if it auto-cancelled, but I don't need it every month. Often I just skip using the product completely since I have no idea if I cancel if they will close my account right away and/or try to refund me. I just don't want to have to set a calendar item to remember to cancel a day before it renews.<p>I'm not opposed to subscriptions, developers need to make money and platforms/OS change all the time (especially in mobile) so there is ongoing maintenance. But the issue for me are apps I only need for a little bit or infrequently. If Adobe offered a "1 month, no renewal" then there is a good chance I'd still be using Photoshop instead of switching to Pixelmator Pro.<p>[0] <a href="https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/" rel="nofollow">https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#purchase" rel="nofollow">https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#purchase</a>