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Lifetime Purchase Option

Feature Request

I'd like to request a lifetime purchase option for the app. I, and likely multiple other users, are already managing many subscriptions, and a one-time payment would be a very welcome alternative.

Posted by Usman ·
Status: Completed3 comments

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Comments3

  • joethephish

    Team•

    Mar 27, 2025

    One-off purchase now available! See the website for details:

    https://selkie.design/substage/

  • joethephish

    Team•

    Mar 15, 2025

    Thanks! Yeah that’s totally understandable, and generally I feel the same way with my own software purchases.

    There are currently two blockers to it being feasible:

    1. I have ongoing LLM provider costs. However, I’m experimenting with local LLM support, so if that works well then I could potentially offer a specific lifetime purchase option for that. (Though I’m a little concerned about the latency of local LLMs - if you’re prompting a quick thing like “convert to jpg”, you don’t want to have to wait 5 seconds or more…)
      The other thing that could enable it is a “bring your own API key” option, which I’d also like to offer.

    2. General sustainability as a business model. Obviously there are plenty of examples of developers who have made it work (especially historically before the more recent trend of everything becoming subscription-based). But I don’t believe that all companies (especially indie devs) that have switched to a subscription business model have all done so out of pure greed.

    So (1) is technical and (2) is financial, but I hope both are solvable!

    • Usman

      •

      Mar 15, 2025

      Thanks for laying out the technical and financial hurdles so clearly. The points about LLM costs and sustainability make perfect sense.

      As a dev myself, I totally understand the latency concerns with a local LLM. However, it might be worth testing and specifying which MacBook configurations (e.g., minimum RAM requirements) would be needed for acceptable performance. It would be great to know what experience users with, say, 48GB of RAM or more might have. Perhaps you could provide recommended configurations for different levels of performance.

      Regarding the "bring your own API key" option, I think that's a fantastic idea, in addition to the local LLM approach. To make it as flexible as possible, I'd suggest allowing users to configure not just the API key itself, but also:

      • Base URL: This would allow users to connect to different API endpoints, including those from third-party providers.

      • Model: Letting users specify the model name gives them control over the capabilities and cost.

      This way, users could easily integrate with services beyond just openai or claude, if they have access to them.

      I'm really hopeful that either the local LLM or BYO API key approach (or both!) will make a lifetime option feasible!