Not another subscription.
Open your phone's subscription drawer. We'll wait.
SaaS was a good idea
Subscriptions solved a real problem. Before them, software was a one-time sale — you paid once, the vendor shipped a box, and whether the product got better after that was mostly luck. Recurring revenue changed that. The company keeps getting paid only if the product keeps being worth paying for. For an early-stage company, that predictability is the companies lifeblood — it's how you hire the next engineer, how you plan the next six months, how you survive long enough to ship anything real.
We don't think subscriptions are the enemy. We've run them. We'll probably run them again.
But everything, all the time?
Somewhere along the way, every product decided it needed to be a subscription. Your password manager. Your weather app. Your toothbrush. Your car's heated seats. The total monthly cost of "just $9.99" has crept up to something that would embarrass a cable company.
People are tired. And when people get tired of paying, the pendulum swings the other way — toward free. Free has a price too. It's just one you pay in data, attention, and quiet manipulation. The two business models we've been offered — pay forever, or be the product — are not the only two that exist.
The third option
Value for value. Priced to the unit of actual use. Paid at the moment the value is delivered. Over open protocols anyone can build on.
Email is the obvious example. A mailbox that costs $10 a month, whether you send one message or a thousand, feels like a tax. A penny per email you actually send feels fair — and for almost everyone it's a fraction of what they pay today.
The other side of that transaction is even more interesting. If sending an email costs a fraction of a cent, a person barely notices. A spammer trying to send a million of them notices a lot. Micropayments don't just price software honestly — they put the incentives in the right place on every side of the wire. The people who abuse a system are the ones who should feel its cost.
What we're building for
This is one of the reasons we're building an x402 payments gateway. Machine-speed payments at the granularity of a single request, on open rails, without API keys or monthly invoices. Infrastructure for a web where you pay for what you use, where sending costs something, and where free can go back to meaning free.
If the subscription drawer on your phone is starting to feel like a trap — we hear you.