Why Kagi launched "no use, no pay"

I'm always interested in new ways to handle billing/subscriptions/etc and this is a cool change.

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:

* Monthly, recurring

* Monthly, one-time

* Yearly, recurring

* Monthly, one-time

* Lifetime, one-time

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.

"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.

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.

[0] https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/

[1] https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#purchase

As much as I like lifetime purchases I think for software products it creates too many liabilities for all parties. Probably in the fine print you need a carve out saying it won't actually be provided in perpetuity (what software is?). As a purchaser I don't think it's realistic to really expect the software forever. I think of it more as a supporter/founder tier with various privileges that will one day end - and it should probably be advertised as such.