Paying for the Garden

I'll be honest: I don't love asking people for money. It's uncomfortable. When I first released Unplugged, I didn't even want to put up a paywall.

What changed my mind was a simple thought: I should respect my own time. And if I want to respect my time, I need to value it. That sounds obvious written down, but it took me a while to actually believe it.

So this post is about pricing. How I think about it, how it's changed for Unplugged, and why I still don't know if I've got it right.

When Unplugged started, it cost 3 euros a year. Back then it only had complications and some basic notifications, which have improved a lot since. It was a simple product with a lot of rough edges, and I didn't feel comfortable charging more for it.

Today the price is about three times that. The app does more than three times as much, too. I raised it because I value it more now, and honestly, because I have more confidence in what I built.

If I'd left it at 3 euros, I doubt I'd be making even 50 euros a month. And that matters more than it sounds. When people actually pay a fair price, it gives me the confidence to pour more time into the app. If I'd kept the low price, Unplugged would probably still be that basic first version. That's a valid strategy for some apps. It's just not mine. As you've probably noticed from other posts, I really like polish and iteration, and both take time. And time, eventually, is money.

I've been thinking about this from the other side too. What do I gladly pay for?

The first thing that comes to mind is Raycast. If you don't know it, it's basically a Spotlight replacement on steroids, with a whole ecosystem of extensions. They recently released an iOS keyboard too.

What I love about it is the team. They update all the time, they're always experimenting, and it's fun to be part of that. When they changed their pricing, there was a lot of pushback. People on Reddit asked why things that used to be free, like bringing your own AI API key, now needed a subscription. Why pay for something that doesn't cost them anything to run?

I get the frustration, but I disagree. Even if there's no server bill, there are people actively working on it. If something breaks, someone fixes it.

So I pay for Raycast because I like the people behind it. I know they care and they'll keep iterating. It solves problems I have, and sometimes problems I didn't know I had. It's excitement and an investment at the same time. I'm funding a vision I want to see happen.

That's the kind of relationship I'd love to have with the people who use Unplugged.

That Reddit question, "why pay for something that doesn't need maintenance?", is really the heart of it. Because software always needs maintenance. It lives in an environment that changes constantly: new iOS versions, new devices, new rules. Leave it alone long enough and it breaks.

The best comparison I have is a garden.

Imagine you pay to visit a garden. You come in when it looks beautiful. But if nobody tends it, it either grows out of control or slowly dies. So when you pay for software, you're not really paying for the garden as it looks today. You're paying for access to it, and for someone to keep it alive. More like a ticket than a deed.

I know that can feel unfair. When you buy something, you expect it to be yours, and I completely get that. But the person who planted the garden is the one who knows the plants. In this case, that's me. I know what I built, why I built it, all its quirks, and what it needs to keep working. If you paid me once and kept visiting for ten years, at some point I couldn't justify it anymore. The plants still need water.

The usual answer is to make an app really cheap and sell it to a lot of people. In theory that works, because distributing an app worldwide costs almost nothing. In practice, reaching that many people is the hard part. I wrote about that in The App Works, People Can't Find It, and not much has changed: Unplugged gets about 10 downloads a day, maybe 20 on a good day.

That's why I lean towards subscriptions, even though I don't love them either. They create the right incentive on both sides. My job as the gardener is to make you want to come back: keep things healthy, plant new things, and earn your trust again and again. And you get to decide, every month or every year, whether it's still worth it. If I stop caring, you stop paying. That keeps me honest.

I do offer a lifetime option, because I know a lot of people prefer it. I just price it so that, if you choose it, it still works out for me over time.

This is the part I struggle with most.

The basics have been free since the very first version: one complication and notifications. That hasn't changed. Free users still get the same experience they had at the beginning, except the app is now more stable and in better shape than ever, because the work underneath benefits everyone.

Everything I've added on top is paid. That's my strategy right now, and I'm not sure it's the right one. My thinking is that it's much easier to make something paid and later make it free than the other way around. Raycast is a good example of why. People got used to something being free, and when it changed, they didn't love it. I wanted to be careful not to do that to anyone.

Maybe I'll open up more features in the future. Whether I should is a whole other question, and I'm genuinely open to hearing what you think.

Then there's the hardest question: how much should the ticket be?

In the garden, value is how much you enjoy being there, and that depends so much on the person. What I try to do is price a bit higher than people in my niche might expect, while staying reasonable. I also use something called purchasing power parity, which in simple words means the price is adjusted to each country's economy. It's not a perfect formula, but nobody should have to pay something that doesn't make sense where they live.

And there's a lot I'd like to plant. Imagine a big oak tree, or something exotic. I need to be able to afford those first. In software, that means things like servers, or tools that cost money every month. Some of the features people ask for need exactly that, and right now I can't afford them.

So it's a balancing act. Price too high, and nobody comes in. Price too low, and not enough people come in to keep it going, and the gardener slowly loses his reason to keep tending it. I know, because I felt it myself back in the 3 euro days.

I don't have a final answer. I'm experimenting and figuring it out as I go, and like everything else, prices might change as the world does.

What I keep coming back to is that thought from the beginning. If I want to respect my own time, I need to value it. But the same goes for you. Your time and money deserve respect too, and the only way I know to earn that is to keep tending the garden and keep making it worth the visit.

I'd love for Unplugged to grow into something much bigger than it is today. Getting the price right, in a way that feels fair to both of us, is part of how it gets there.

P.S. I recently found a simple pricing survey that helps with exactly this. It's four quick questions about where your limits are, from suspiciously cheap to way too expensive, and with enough answers it shows a price range most people find fair. If you have a minute, I'd love your answers.

And if you have thoughts that don't fit in four numbers, you can email me at christiansko@unpluggedapp.site or find me on X at @chris_iosdev.

Written by Christian Skorobogatow