If you want to add unlimited cards – or support my work – but don't want to pay monthly or yearly for Kinopio, you can now purchase a liftetime plan for $200.
The lifetime plan is a perpetual license for as long as Kinopio operates. Which is planned for many years, likely decades.
As always, your support is deeply appreciated. Upgrading helps kinopio be economically-sustainable, bootstrapped, organic software.
Backstory
A one-time purchase option has been requested a number of times, but I've gone back and forth on whether I should provide it…
On one hand, because Kinopio is web software that uses a server to enable things like sharing and collaborating on spaces, and that server has an ongoing cost to keep running, recurring subscriptions are the most sustainable option.
However that being said, subscriptions carry a negative connotation for those who've been burned by Adobe and similarly greedy companies that use dark patterns to hold your data hostage with hidden cancellation fees – while also continually raising prices.
That Kinopio subscriptions have never, and will never, do these things isn't something you'd assume if you've been screwed over before.
So this new plan exists in the spirit of inviting people in and giving them options. It's my hope that this encourages more people to pay for Kinopio, but also to tell their friends about the cool new tool they bought. And maybe in the farther future, if they wanted to purchase some swag, or make a donation, that could be cool too :)
About the Price
My initial plan was to charge $150, 2.5× the yearly price. But when I put the number into the actual Upgrade UI I was worried that it felt too low. So I asked what people thought on Discord. In response, thomasyo posted this, which captured the user perspective better than I could have and pushed me to $200.
Take this with a grain of salt because it's more of a feeling than something I have evidence for.
Basically I think you kind of want to incentivize people to subscribe rather than take the lifetime option right? $150 is still high enough that it probably achieves that, but I think $200 doesn't sound outrageous and would give you more leeway in the long run maybe? My perception of people who want lifetime options aren't so much looking for discounts as they are religiously against subscriptions, so they'd be willing to pay more. I'm not suggesting this to soak your customers but rather to make sure that you have enough revenue to keep it going. Like what if a bunch of people take the lifetime option and new subscriptions stall after two years? I have no idea what your financials look like and I'm not an expert but it's abstractly something I would worry about as a potential customer.
From my perspective as a user, if I'm going to invest my time and energy into Kinopio then I want to feel confident that it won't go away. Having too low of a lifetime price for something kind of makes me uneasy about its long term viability. That's usually fine for something that just fulfills a specific function, but in this context I sort of assume that I keep paying for the service and you keep improving it.
Also, to be clear, I'm mostly speaking generally about how I perceive subscriptions and lifetime options. I was following your work long before I started using Kinopio and I really appreciate how candid you've been about it so I do not personally feel concerned the way I might if I didn't know anything about it.