Why Phonic Is Not a Subscription

Phonic is our first app. It records dictation and meetings on iPhone, iPad and Mac, with an Apple Watch companion, and transcribes them on the device. It is free to download. Phonic Pro, which adds the meeting features, is a £2.99 in-app purchase. You pay once, inside the app, and that is it.

There is no monthly or annual plan. That choice has costs as well as benefits. This post covers what the price buys and how one-off pricing compares with a subscription for a small app, including the parts that are less comfortable for us as the developer.

What is free and what Pro adds

Without paying anything you get:

• Recording from the microphone, and importing audio or video files
• On-device transcription with timings for every word
• Playback with line and word highlighting, from 0.5x to 2x
• Full-text search across every recording
• Folders, and export to Text, Markdown or SRT
• iCloud Drive storage, the Apple Watch app, widgets and controls

Phonic Pro adds four things, all aimed at calls and meetings:

• Speaker identification and naming
• System audio recording from apps such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom
• Meeting mode, which mixes your microphone with the other participants
• The Insights tab: a summary, key points, action items, decisions, topics and talk time

The split is simple. If you record yourself, whether that is notes, dictation or a voice memo, the free app covers it. If you record conversations with other people and want to know who said what and what was agreed, that is Pro.

Phonic needs iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 or watchOS 27. The product page has the full feature list.

Subscription fatigue is real

Most people have more subscriptions than they would choose to have if they started again. Each one is small. A few pounds a month for a notes app, a few more for a scanner, another for a password manager, another for cloud storage. Individually they are easy to justify. Together they add up to a noticeable monthly figure, and many of them are for apps that are opened a handful of times a month.

The money is only part of it. A subscription is an ongoing decision. You have to remember what you signed up for, notice when the free trial converts, and decide each renewal whether it is still worth it. Some people respond by refusing to subscribe to anything new, which means an app with a subscription never gets a chance with them, however good it is.

For a business, the picture is similar but with more paperwork. Recurring software costs need approving, tracking and reviewing. A one-off purchase of a few pounds is a much easier conversation than another line on the monthly software bill.

What a one-off price does well

For the person buying, a one-off price is easy to understand. You know the total cost before you start. There is nothing to cancel and no renewal date to remember. If you use Phonic Pro twice a year for a couple of important calls, you have not paid twelve months for it.

For the developer, it removes a particular kind of pressure. A subscription has to keep justifying itself every month, which pushes developers towards adding features to give people a reason to keep paying, whether or not those features are needed. A one-off price lets the app be judged on what it does now.

It also suits how many people use a tool like this. Recording and transcription are things you might need intensively for a few weeks and then not at all for months. Paying monthly for something you use in bursts feels poor value, even when the monthly figure is low.

The downsides, for us

A one-off price is not free of trade-offs, and most of them land on the developer.

Revenue stops when sales stop. A subscription brings in money from existing users every month. A one-off purchase brings in money once per person. To keep earning, the app has to keep finding new users. Under this model, people who have already bought don’t usually pay again for updates.

Ongoing work is not funded by ongoing income. Apple releases new versions of its operating systems every year. Apps need updating to keep working, and the features people expect change over time. That work costs time whether or not anyone is buying the app that month.

Revenue is harder to predict. Subscription income is relatively steady and easy to forecast. One-off sales tend to be lumpy, with peaks around launches and updates and quiet periods in between. For a small team, that makes planning harder.

The price has to be right first time. With a subscription, a developer can adjust the price for new subscribers and the change is gradual. With a one-off purchase, every early buyer has paid the launch price permanently.

None of these are reasons a one-off price cannot work. They are the costs of choosing it, and any developer considering the same model should go in with them understood.

Where on-device processing fits in

One common justification for subscriptions is that the developer has ongoing costs for every user, for example servers that process audio or store files. When the cost of serving a user continues every month, charging every month makes sense.

Phonic works differently in two specific ways. Transcription runs on your device using Apple’s speech models, and with Phonic Pro speakers are also identified on your device. Recordings are saved as files in your own iCloud Drive, or in a Phonic Library on the device if you do not use iCloud. Phonic does not ask you to create an account with us. The privacy policy covers this in more detail.

So the per-user server cost argument doesn’t apply to transcription or storage. The development and maintenance work described above still has to be done, though. And this is how the app works, not an explanation of why we priced it this way.

The first transcription in a language downloads Apple’s speech model, and the first speaker identification downloads a speaker model of about 120 MB. Both are reused afterwards, and it is worth downloading them on Wi-Fi before a long meeting.

Buying Phonic Pro

Phonic Pro is bought inside the app. It is an in-app purchase made through Apple, and Apple handles the payment under its own terms and privacy policy.

The practical advice is to use the free app first. Record something, check the transcription works for your voice and language, and try search and export. If you then find you need to record calls with other people, Pro is there.

The practical takeaway

Phonic is free for recording and transcribing your own audio. Phonic Pro is a single £2.99 purchase that adds speaker identification, system audio, Meeting mode and Insights. There is no subscription.

One-off pricing is simpler for the person buying. For the developer it means income that stops when sales stop and maintenance that still has to be paid for. We accepted those costs. They did not go away.

If you are weighing a similar decision about how to price software or a service, get in touch.