Why We Don't Do Subscriptions (For Software That Runs On Your Device)

Tejaswi Dhulipala — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 05:24:20 +0000

The average person now pays for dozens of software subscriptions. Streaming, storage, productivity, notes, passwords, VPNs, budgeting. Each one is "just $5/month" — until you add them up.

Some of those are honest. Streaming pays for licenses and bandwidth. Cloud storage pays for disks someone has to keep spinning. Real ongoing cost, real ongoing service.

But for a budgeting app — software that lives on your device, stores data on your device, and depends on no remote infrastructure to function — charging you forever is a different beast entirely. You're not paying for ongoing work. You're paying so they don't take it away.

For a personal finance tool whose entire purpose is to help you spend less money, that contradiction is hard to ignore. So when we built Zeroed, we wrote a different rule: we don't charge subscriptions for software that runs on your device.

The test

The line is simple. If you stop paying, what actually stops working?

If the answer is "a tool sitting on my hard drive" — that's rent extraction. That's the model we refuse.

If the answer is "the servers, the phone numbers, the AI models, and the people running them on my behalf" — that's a service. Services have real ongoing cost, and pretending otherwise is dishonest pricing.

That's why our rule as a two-person-sized indie studio is simple:

Our apps are pay-once. They run on your device. They don't need us to keep working. No recurring fees, ever.
If we ever ship something with real ongoing cost — servers, AI inference, infrastructure we run for you — it will be an optional, monthly, cancel-anytime service with full data export. And the app you bought will always work fully without it.

We charge for what we actually do — never for software sitting on your hard drive.

What you're really paying for (when it's wrong)

When a personal-software company charges you monthly for an app that runs on your hardware, here's what your money is buying:

Server infrastructure to hold your data hostage
Growth metrics to satisfy investors
Retention tactics to make it painful to leave

Your monthly payment isn't buying features. It's buying the company permission to keep your data on their servers — data they could monetize, lose in a breach, or hold hostage if you try to cancel.

The math

A typical subscription budgeting app at $99/year versus a one-time license:

Time period	Subscription	Pay once
Year 1	$99	$19.99, once
Year 3	$297	$19.99
Year 5	$495	$19.99
Year 10	$990	$19.99

The subscription costs nearly $1,000 over a decade.

I'd genuinely like to hear where other devs draw this line — especially if you ship desktop/mobile software with a subscription and think I'm wrong. What's the honest defence of recurring pricing for local software?

Originally published on our blog. Zeroed is a pay-once, offline envelope-budgeting app for Windows and Android (34-day free trial, no card).

How We Do Bank-Grade Encryption and Cross-Device Sync Without Running a Server

Tejaswi Dhulipala — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 10:16:32 +0000

Most budgeting apps store your financial data on their servers. This means:

They can see your transactions, balances, and spending habits
A server breach exposes your financial life
If the company shuts down, your data may be lost
They can — and often do — monetize aggregate financial data

We built Zeroed to make all of these impossible. Here's the architecture.

Local-first architecture

Zeroed stores your entire financial database locally on your device in an encrypted SQLite database. The encryption key is derived from your device and never transmitted anywhere.

This means:

We cannot read your data — we don't have the key
We cannot lose your data — we don't have a copy
We cannot sell your data — we literally don't have access to it

Cross-device sync via Google Drive

The obvious question: if there's no server, how do you sync between your phone and laptop?

The answer: your own Google Drive.

When you enable sync, Zeroed creates a folder called ZeroedData in your personal Google Drive using the drive.file scope. This scope means Zeroed can only access files it created — it cannot see your photos, documents, or anything else.

Your encrypted database is uploaded to this folder. Any other device running Zeroed and signed into the same Google account will detect the folder, download the encrypted database, and decrypt it locally.

Licensing without license servers

Your Zeroed license also lives in Google Drive as a secure verification file. When you purchase a license, the key is placed in your ZeroedData folder. Any device that connects to that Drive sees the key and unlocks the full app automatically.

No license servers. No activation limits. No "you've used too many devices" errors.

AES-256 encryption

All data synced through Google Drive is encrypted with AES-256 — the same standard used by governments and financial institutions. The encryption happens on your device before the data leaves for Google Drive, and decryption happens on your device after download.

At no point does unencrypted financial data exist outside of your device's memory.

What this means for users

Switch phones freely — sign into Google Drive and you're synced
Use the app fully offline — sync when you reconnect
Your financial data is mathematically inaccessible to anyone but you

Happy to answer questions about the architecture in the comments — the trade-offs of serverless sync (conflict resolution, key management, the no-web-app constraint) are genuinely interesting problems.