Subscription trackers you pay for once, not every month
A one-time-purchase tracker charges a single price and then stops: you own the unlock, nothing renews, and nothing expires when your card does. The catch worth knowing first is that app-store purchases belong to the store account that made them, so a Google Play unlock doesn't carry over to the App Store.
The short answer
A one-time-purchase tracker charges you a single price and then stops. You own the unlock: no renewal date, nothing to cancel, nothing that lapses when your card expires. The one thing to understand before you buy anything is that an app-store purchase belongs to the store account that made it — a Google Play unlock doesn't carry over to the App Store, and vice versa.
Why most trackers bill monthly
Partly because for some of them the costs genuinely recur. An app that reads your bank feed pays to keep that connection alive every month it exists, on top of servers, support and compliance. Recurring costs get funded by recurring revenue, and that argument deserves to be stated before the obvious joke about it.
Here's the obvious joke anyway: a tracker that bills monthly never stops billing. It's the one category where the pricing model argues with the pitch — an app that exists to reduce the number of small monthly charges you don't think about, by adding one more small monthly charge you don't think about.
An app whose data lives on your device doesn't carry the same running cost. That's what makes a single price structurally possible rather than a limited-time stunt.
What "lifetime" actually means
- You own the unlock, you're not renting it. No renewal, no expiry, nothing to remember to cancel. Reinstall or move to a new phone and Restore Purchases asks the store what your account already owns, then gives it back.
- It's tied to one store account. A Google Play purchase restores on the Google account that bought it and covers that account's Android devices. An App Store purchase restores on the Apple Account that bought it and covers that account's Apple devices. It does not cross between the two.
- "Lifetime" means the app's lifetime. Nobody can honestly promise you decades. What you can check is how long the developer has been shipping, and whether the app still works with no connection.
- Ask what's included later. Some lifetime unlocks cover today's feature list and charge again for the next one. That's a fair model, but it's a different one — ask before you pay.
Three questions before you buy any "lifetime" unlock. Does anything in the fine print renew or expire? Which store account will own it, and is that the account you'll still be using in three years? And can you export or back up your data if you ever leave? A tracker that won't let you take the list out is charging you once for the software and forever for the lock-in.
Do the arithmetic before you pay, either way
You don't need anyone's marketing numbers for this. Take any monthly fee, multiply by twelve, then by however many years you expect to keep tracking subscriptions — three is conservative for a problem you'd only install an app to solve if it were chronic. That total is the real price of a recurring tracker, and it's the number to hold next to a single payment.
The honest counterpoint: a one-time purchase is a bet that the developer will still be there, while a monthly fee is money you can stop handing over the day the app stops earning it. If that's how you think about software, a subscription is a defensible choice and we won't pretend otherwise. What isn't defensible is paying monthly for years without ever doing the multiplication.
Subby's model, stated plainly
The free version tracks your subscriptions properly — add, edit, categorise, pause, archive — with no cap on how many, no account and no sign-in. It's paid for by ads. PRO is a single purchase: one payment, yours forever. It unlocks five things: an ad-free app, automatic weekly cloud backup to your own Google Drive (and iCloud on iPhone), the home-screen widget, service icon requests, and AI screenshot import. There's no monthly plan, no annual plan and no free trial to forget about, because there's nothing recurring to trial.
Two limits, in the same breath as the pitch. PRO is bought per store: a Google Play purchase unlocks nothing on the App Store and the reverse is equally true. What does move between Android and iPhone is your subscription list, through your own Google Drive backup — that's a backup mechanism, not a shared purchase. And the free tier shows ads, which is how it stays genuinely free for people who never upgrade.
The free-tier-first path
The upgrade decision gets much easier once the list exists. Add your subscriptions, live with the reminders through a couple of renewal cycles, and see whether the app has earned a payment. If it hasn't, keep using it for free — the tracking isn't the part behind the paywall, and there's no cap waiting to ambush you at subscription number eleven.
If it has, you pay once. That's the entire commercial relationship, and it's the same one the app is trying to help you have with everything else on your phone.
Pay once, or don't pay at all.
The free version tracks everything with no cap. PRO is one payment, yours forever.
Free · No account · No bank login