Why doesn't Gather offer a Lifetime Subscription Tier with a One-Time Payment Option?

First, we want to state that we do completely understand the reality of ‘subscription-fatigue’ and thus the desire for a one-time payment option. We’ve thought about this for a long time and ultimately decided that it would not only be very risky for the future of Gather but also potentially lead to a misalignment of incentives between us, the app developer, and our community members. In this article, we’ll explain all of this in detail.

Risk
Unlike a t-shirt, where costs are covered at the point of sale, Gather has ongoing per-user costs.

The more community members we have using the app, the higher our costs become. To offer a one-time fee would require extensive future forecasting of continued costs to ensure that we don’t end up losing money in the long term. Without revenue, we would not be able to continue supporting the app for the community.

Furthermore, we’d need to estimate the increased per-user cost of features that we anticipate our members may eventually want to use.

Here, you may start to see where offering one-time payments could lead to misaligned incentives with our members.

Misaligned Incentives
As it currently stands, our profits scale linearly with user retention. If our users are using the app twice as long, we’d make twice as much profit. As a result, we allocate most of our resources to enhancing the app's experience and features, with the goal of increasing user retention.

That means, in the current system, our interests are aligned with yours: continually improving the app is, of course, in the users’ best interest, which means users will use the app more, and that, in turn, is in the business’s best interest too.

If a large portion of our users were one-time payment, lifetime access users, then the incentive flips, as the business would make the most profit from getting someone to purchase the lifetime option and then use the app as little as possible. Additionally, we’d be disincentivized from adding new features that incur higher per-user costs.

Remember, we’re a team of foragers who built this app for foragers and people learning foraging. Our mission is to provide the best foraging app possible to as many people as possible, so this is not the incentive structure we’re after at all!

When interests and incentives are aligned, everyone tends to be happy, both within our team and our community. When they are not, someone usually ends up disappointed with the short end of the stick. We don’t want to put ourselves in a position where the best thing for the business would be bad for our community, or vice versa.

Therefore, not offering a lifetime subscription with a one-time payment is one of many decisions we’ve made to ensure we can keep building the best foraging app and community both today and for years to come.