Small on their own, a fixed cost together
Subscriptions are cheap taken one at a time. A few dollars a month is about what a coffee costs.
Count up what you’ve signed up for since your child was born, though, and the number comes out higher than you’d guess. Photo storage, music, video, cloud storage, something for learning. Each one small; lined up, a fixed cost.
I signed up for plenty myself after my kids were born — Google Drive, Netflix, YouTube Premium, Apple Music. I’ve since cancelled most of them, and Apple Music is about the only one still running. That freed up about $30 a month.
What wears you down isn’t the amount so much as not being able to see the end of it. Buy something outright and it’s yours once you’ve paid. Subscribe, and you keep paying as long as you keep using it. Features get added, things do get better — but for something you want to keep for ten or twenty years, like a record of your child, that endlessness sits heavily.
Holding your photos is what makes it monthly
Something to get out of the way first, though: this isn’t an argument that subscription apps are expensive, or bad.
An app that shares photos with your family holds those photos on a server. It stores them, delivers them to everyone’s phone, keeps copies so that nothing is lost. That machinery runs more, not less, as more people use it. Storage and bandwidth cost real money every month.
So the cost of holding something runs for as long as it’s held. Trying to cover that with a single payment breaks down somewhere. You can’t promise to keep a server running for ten years on the strength of one transaction.
That’s why sharing apps are monthly, and it’s the right shape for what they do. If someone is holding your photos, paying for them to go on holding them follows.
Not holding them is what makes paying once possible
our365 doesn’t send your photos to a server. They stay on your iPhone and in your own iCloud. We aren’t holding them.
Because we aren’t, the running cost doesn’t pile up as more people use it. One person using it for ten years leaves no server of ours running. There’s no monthly cost on our side, so there’s no reason to ask for a monthly payment.
That’s why it’s a one-time purchase. It isn’t that we ruled out a subscription first — paying once became possible as a result of deciding not to hold your photos.
That thinking isn’t going to change. Which also means: if we ever build something that does hold photos — syncing between two parents’ phones, say — that part would have to be monthly. Holding costs money for as long as it lasts, and the logic from the previous section comes straight back at us.
Even then, we won’t turn something you already have into a subscription. If what you bought outright becomes a monthly charge later, calling it a one-time purchase meant nothing. What doesn’t hold your photos stays paid-once; if we add something that does, that part carries its own cost. That’s where the line sits.
The difference in pricing comes from what the app does with your photos — whether it holds them, and so whether there’s a monthly running cost — not from one being better than the other. Asking whether a sharing app or our365 is cheaper doesn’t get you very far. They’re doing different jobs.
What’s free, and what Family PRO adds
Here’s where the line falls.
| Free, always | Family PRO | |
|---|---|---|
| Posting and viewing | ○ | ○ |
| Reminder and widget | ○ | ○ |
| Export and iCloud backup | ○ | ○ |
| A second child, and beyond | — | ○ |
| Posting back to the day they were born | — | ○ |
If you’re keeping one photo a day for one child, the free version covers all of it. It doesn’t expire. The reminder and widget that keep you going, and the export that takes your photos back out, are all in it.
Family PRO is a one-time purchase with no expiry — no subscription, and nothing to cancel. The pricing section on the home page has the current price for your region.
The rule for where to draw the line was this: anything you need in order to keep going, one photo a day, stays free. The reminder and the export are both of that kind — one keeps you going, the other keeps your photos safe. Charging for those would be backwards.
The two things Family PRO adds are the ones you come to want once the habit has taken. A second child means another calendar filling up alongside the first; posting back to the day they were born is something you reach for after you’ve decided to stay.
Choosing which photo to keep is a subject of its own — Too many photos of my kids to sort covers that.
The weak spot of paying once
Paying once carries a worry that a subscription doesn’t: how long will the person who made it keep at it?
With a subscription, there’s an expectation that support continues while you’re paying. With a one-time purchase the paying is done, and you have no leverage if the updates stop. That worry is fair, so here are two things that might settle it a little.
One is that there’s little to maintain. We aren’t holding your photos, so our fixed costs barely move as more people use the app. A design that costs little to run is, for that reason, one that keeps running.
The other is that the photos are already yours. our365’s photos sit on your iPhone and in your iCloud from the start. Nothing is locked inside the app. Export is free to use. Even if this app were never updated again, the part that matters — the photos themselves — stays where it is.
What’s actually worth checking before buying an app outright isn’t the price. It’s this: if the people who made it go away, can you still get your data out? If you can, paying once is a safe thing to choose.
