The Case Against Subscriptions for Simple Tools

Pixla Sites, Pixla Editor and Vaporware are free. Not a trial, not a free tier with the useful parts locked: the whole app, yours to keep.

That follows from a simple test. A tool that runs on your Mac costs us the same whether you open it once a year or every morning, so charging you every month for it would be charging you for nothing new. A tool should earn its place by being good, not by making itself hard to leave.

Some things do cost money every month. A website has to be served from somewhere, around the clock. Email has to be sent, and delivered, and kept off spam lists. Those are services, and Pixla Hosting and Pixla Mail are where we charge for them — as subscriptions, because the cost behind them is a subscription too.

Even there, we hold ourselves to a few rules. A static site costs almost nothing to serve, so there’s a free plan for one. Plans are metered, never cut off: if your site has a big month, it stays up, and we tell you before you go past your allowance instead of taking it down when you do.

And you can always leave. Everything Pixla Sites makes exports to a folder of plain files that work on any web host, or opened straight from your disk. A subscription you can walk away from is one you keep because it’s worth it.