Why I changed how Hense is priced (from $11.99 once to freemium)

Hense turns six months old on the App Store in a couple of days. It has been quite the adventure, full of challenging, interesting, and inspiring moments. What started as wanting to build a more down-to-earth and affordable alternative to Trello turned into finding out there were people out there who were genuinely interested in the project and supportive of it. I truly believe Hense is just getting started. (I told the fuller origin story in why I built Hense.)

Originally, I planned Hense as a paid app, and I launched it that way: $11.99, one time. After these six months, I’ve come to see the shortcomings of that model, at least in the era we’re in right now. Let me walk through why I changed my mind, and what Hense’s pricing looks like today.

The App Store is more crowded than ever

I have to start with the elephant in the room: generative AI. These tools have changed almost everything about how software gets built, and the monetization around it is no exception. Over the past year, as the models from Anthropic and OpenAI got much better at real coding work, the number of apps shipping to the App Store has grown enormously. Discoverability has become a battlefield, and a lot of people are reaching for the same playbook to win it. The most popular move on the pricing side? Free, plus a subscription.

I have a lot more to say about building apps in this new era, probably enough for its own post. But for pricing specifically, the takeaway is simple: when everyone runs the same play, running it too makes you invisible.

Subscription fatigue is real, and I feel it too

The Free-plus-subscription model is the popular choice among indie developers, and I understand the appeal. Subscriptions mean more stable revenue, and stable revenue lets you plan your business with more confidence. I also understand that some apps genuinely need it. If you’re paying for servers, or for third-party APIs that make core features work, that money has to come from somewhere, and a subscription is a fair way to cover it.

But here’s the honest part: not every app has those costs. And asking people to subscribe to something that doesn’t need ongoing money to run is exactly the kind of thing that wears them down. Subscription fatigue is real. Streaming services and SaaS have stretched people’s patience so thin that users are now openly vocal about how much they dislike being asked to subscribe to one more thing.

I feel this personally, because I’m one of those users. I really dislike paying for subscriptions. That feeling is a big part of what pulled me from my background in web development into building apps in the first place.

It reminds me of something from when I was a kid. After my dad bought our first PC, one of the first pieces of software he got was Encarta. If you don’t remember it, it was basically Wikipedia on a CD, and a new edition came out every year or two. But here’s the thing: you could buy a single edition, once, and it stayed useful for as long as you wanted it. You owned it. SaaS quietly erased that idea. You can’t really count on “buy it once and it’s yours” anymore, and I think we lost something real when it went away.

The path most people skip: free to try, then pay once

So here’s where I landed. If almost every new app is Free plus a subscription, then the way to stand out in that noise is not to run the same play. It’s to offer the tired user something they actually want: a free version to try, and a single payment to unlock everything, with no subscription. It’s the same instinct that made me build Hense as an alternative to Trello’s model in the first place, and I compared the two for solo users separately.

That’s what Hense is now. It’s free to start, and a one-time $9.99 unlock gets you Pro, with everything the app offers. I chose $9.99 on purpose. It’s a little lower than the original $11.99, low enough to be an easy yes once you’ve actually used the app and know it fits the way you work.

And that word, “actually,” is the whole point. The old model asked you to pay $11.99 before you’d ever opened the app. In today’s App Store, that’s a big ask. There are a dozen alternatives one search away, and the chances you get to convince someone to stick around are scarce, so each one has to count. A price tag on the front door works against you. Free-to-start removes it. You try the app, and if it earns a place in your week, you pay once to unlock the rest.

Free users make Hense better

There’s another reason that matters just as much, and it’s about the improve-and-release cycle I want for Hense. With the original $11.99 gate, fewer people ever reached the app, and that was a real handicap when it came time to figure out what to improve and what to fix. Now that the gate is gone and more people are actually using it, prioritizing what to work on next becomes much clearer, which helps me make the app as good as it can be. There’s also a different kind of motivation baked into this model: because I want people to choose to upgrade from Free to Pro, finding and removing every possible pain point becomes a much clearer goal.

The people who already paid

One thing mattered to me more than anything else in this transition: the people who already bought Hense. If you paid for the app at any point before this change, you’ve been moved to Pro automatically. You paid once, and you keep everything, forever. Nobody who supported the app early loses a thing, and nobody has to pay again for what they already own.

To me this isn’t a nice-to-have detail. It’s the whole ethic of the thing. If I’m going to argue that software should respect your wallet, that has to include the wallets of the people who believed in the app first.

This isn’t the last word on Hense’s pricing

I want to be honest about one more thing: choosing free-plus-a-one-time-unlock today doesn’t mean I’m against subscriptions forever. If the day comes when Hense genuinely needs ongoing costs to keep doing something valuable, or if the people using it start asking for a subscription, that’s a conversation worth having.

And people do sometimes ask. As an app grows, V2 and V3 offer more than V1 did, and it’s fair for the price to grow along with the value. At some point, someone might rather pay in smaller installments than in one larger unlock, and that’s exactly the kind of moment where a subscription can make sense. If it comes, I’ll consider it. But I’ll always respect how the people before them chose to pay.

For now, the bet is a simple one. Reduce the friction, respect the wallet, and let the app earn the upgrade instead of demanding it at the door. I have more to say about all of this, probably enough for a couple more posts, but that’s the main reason Hense changed, and I wanted to get it down first.

If you want to see where it landed, Hense is on the App Store, free to start on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Have thoughts on app pricing, or on where indie software is heading? I’d genuinely love to hear them. Get in touch.