I could have made it a subscription. I didn't.

My House, My Things is £34.99, once, on the Mac App Store. No account, no monthly anything.

I want to explain that, because the obvious version of this app is a subscription, and I’d almost certainly make more money if it were one.

It’s a Mac app for keeping the record of your house: what’s in it, what it cost, when the boiler was last serviced. Which is exactly the sort of thing that gets sold as a service these days. A few pounds a month, syncs everywhere, you never think about it. I kept coming back to one problem with that.

A record is not a service

A service has to be running to be useful. Email, maps, a video call. If the servers go dark the thing stops existing, and paying monthly to keep it alive is fair enough. That’s what you’re paying for.

A record is the opposite. It doesn’t need to be running anywhere. It needs to still be there in ten years, when the boiler finally packs up and you want to know who fitted it, or the dishwasher dies and you can’t remember whether it was three years old or five.

Put a subscription on that and you’ve turned your own records into something you rent. The day you stop paying is the day you can’t open the file with your serial numbers in it. For a house you’ll own for thirty years, that’s absurd. The record ought to outlast the app, the company that made it, and very possibly me.

So the price is the price. You buy it, it’s yours.

What that decided

Ruling out a subscription turned out to rule out a lot of other things too, which was clarifying.

There’s no account, because there’s nothing to log in to. Everything lives in one file on your Mac. The app has no network permission at all. Not “we don’t collect data”, which is a promise; it literally can’t. macOS won’t let it. There’s no version of this where something quietly phones home, because there’s no home to phone.

And there’s a CSV export, one click, because a record you can’t get out of the app isn’t really yours either. If you decide next year that a spreadsheet suits you better, off you go with the lot.

The honest trade

I’ll be straight about what this costs me.

I’d probably make more money as a subscription. Recurring revenue is easier to build a product on; a one-off price is a bet that enough people will buy it, once, and that’s it.

The bigger cost is more concrete. No subscription means no server, and no server means no sync in version one. Your record lives on one Mac. If you’ve got two, you’re moving a file between them, which is fine but isn’t magic.

I thought about this for a long time and landed on: I’d rather ship no sync than bad sync. Sync done carelessly is worse than none at all; on a record, the entire point is that it’s correct. Two copies that disagree about when the gutters were cleared is a record you no longer trust, and a record you don’t trust is just a file. The iPhone app arrives when sync is solved properly, and not before.

From the other side

I run a web studio, Prystine, so I see the subscription-everything pattern from the vendor’s side as well. And I understand it. Predictable revenue is what makes a small business plannable, and plenty of things genuinely are services and should be priced like one.

It’s just become the default, applied to everything, including the things that aren’t. A record of your house isn’t a service. It’s a document. Some things should be bought, kept, and left alone to do their job.

That’s what this is.

My House, My Things is on the Mac App Store, £34.99, once: apps.apple.com/app/id6812472034