A lot of people hate subscriptions. We get that.
Subscriptions help publishers but are not always good for the consumer.
When we launched OfficeTime 20 years ago, subscriptions were such a foreign (and unpleasant) thing that it was a no brainer for us to sell one-off purchases.
Later we launched version 2 and decided to offer a choice. Subscription or one-off purchase. The subscription allowed us to offer cloud sync which wouldn’t otherwise be possible for a small company because it has ongoing costs.
Until now, you could purchase the one-off edition or do a bit better with a Freelancer subscription or even better with the Business subscription. There was a subtle encouragement to get a subscription over the one-off purchase. You couldn’t get some features that people really wanted like Budgets unless you subscribed.
We were treating one-off purchasers as second class citizens.
Well, no more.
Now, every feature that you used to have to subscribe for is available in a one-off purchase edition. The only exception is cloud sync. It costs us money everyday and selling something that can be used forever makes it hard to stay in business.
Not only that, we’re doubling down on what the one-off edition can offer. Many people who don’t want a subscription also interestingly enough do want data privacy. So we’ve been spending time making OfficeTime sync more easily between all of your devices without your sensitive time and financial data ever touching the cloud. We never see your data. Nor does anyone else.
Just like the subscription side, there’s now a standard and pro version available as a one-off purchase. Of course, just like any other software, we will eventually make bigger, newer versions and offer those as a paid upgrade. But the upgrade is always up to you. You can keep your app and your data forever. We believe we need to earn that upgrade through better time tracking that saves you money or makes your life easier.
We believe in one-off purchases. We will continue to offer them. And we will continue to find ways to make it easy, secure and better.
David Riggins
Thank all of you for continuing to produce such a great tool for those of us who must keep time tracking.
I only have one (continuing) request…. When are we going to get Outlook linking capabilities? I know you are working on it and I appreciate the struggles you are having.
Stephen
Hi David,
You know, it’s frustrating. After ages of work and testing Outlook calendar sync, we were just about to release it and… Microsoft killed it. We can no longer integrate with Outlook without actually getting access to your online Outlook account.
We’ve been a bit reluctant to ask people to sign us into their account so haven’t undertaken the work to redo it yet.