Our subscription philosophy

RecordLog is free to download, gives you seven days of the whole app, and then asks for one $5.99 purchase. No renewal, no tiers, no recurring charge, no account. After the trial, every recording you already made stays yours — playing, renaming, exporting and recovering them stays free forever. Paying once does not mean the app stands still either: it keeps getting updated, and what people ask for shapes what gets built next.

That is the whole price. There is no second page of pricing, no tier that unlocks the features you actually wanted, and nothing to cancel.

Every app from TLC Designs is built on the same four rules: it works on the device, it asks for no account, it carries no advertising, and it is bought once.

Those rules are not a marketing position, they are a bet about what software should feel like. An app you bought is yours. Nobody can switch it off, raise its price, remove a feature behind a new tier, or decide next quarter that the business model changed and you are now renting what you already paid for. It works on a plane. It works when a company's servers are down, because there are none. It works in five years, when the version you paid for is still the version you have.

That is worth more to us than recurring revenue, and it is what we would want from software we use ourselves.

Most apps today arrive with a subscription by default — not because they have to, but because recurring revenue is worth more to the company than a single payment.

Think about what a subscription is supposed to pay for: something that keeps costing money. Now think about a recording app, an alarm clock, or a calculator that lives entirely on your phone. Your use of it does not create a bill. Ten recordings a day cost exactly the same to run as ten recordings a year, because there is no server, no bandwidth, no per-use fee and no third party being paid behind the scenes.

When a monthly charge is attached to software whose running cost does not rise with use, the subscription is not paying for the app. It is paying for the business model. It turns a purchase into rent, and it keeps charging after the app has already paid for itself. That is the practice we object to — not subscriptions in general.

There are legitimate reasons to charge one, and we would not pretend otherwise. An app that calls a paid API every time you use it carries a bill that never stops. An app that stores your data on a server pays for that server every month. An app that licenses data, or runs heavy computation somewhere other than your phone, has costs that scale with use.

In those cases a subscription is the honest price, because the cost is real and ongoing. If we ever build something like that, we will say so on the app's page, in plain language, before you pay: what the money covers, why a one-time price cannot cover it, and what happens if you stop. A paid API is the clearest example — every lookup costs money to run, so a single purchase could not honestly cover it.

The distinction matters because the two get sold to you as the same thing. A company that pays for servers and charges you monthly is covering a cost. A company whose app runs on your phone and charges you monthly is not covering a cost — it is charging rent on something you already own, and calling it a service.

That is why "everyone does subscriptions now" should not be the end of the question. The right question is whether the app has a bill that never stops. If it does, a subscription makes sense and we will say so. If it does not, then a subscription is a way to charge you again for something that costs nothing more to run — and that is the version we refuse to sell.

RecordLog is the app available now: free download, seven-day full trial, one $5.99 purchase. That is the entire price, and it stays that way.

If a future app ever needs a subscription to be honest about its costs, this page will name that app and explain exactly why. There will be no quiet exception buried in a settings screen.

Questions about pricing, trials or refunds are answered on the RecordLog page and through the feedback form. No account needed.