No Subscription. No Kidding.

Athena is a one-time purchase. It was part of the philosophy from the beginning. I hate renting things. I hate paying monthly for something on the off chance it gets a killer new feature at some point when the base application is usually enough.

I do get it. I understand why some developers have gone this route. And after spending the time I spent building Athena, I'm more inclined to keep some of the subscriptions offered by small independent developers like me. They need the ongoing revenue, especially if this is their only gig.

But Adobe? Microsoft? The big tech companies? Somewhere along the way, they decided the best way to make a multi-million dollar software company even more multi-million-y was to make everyone pay for the things they'd been using for decades once a month. A useful app became one more tiny rent payment. Cancel it and the thing you built your habits around might disappear, lock, downgrade, or become just inconvenient enough to make you sigh and keep paying.

I did not want that for Athena. And whether I sell 100 copies or 100,000, I don't plan on offering any of the Olympus tools for anything other than a perpetual license. Incremental updates like 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc. will be free. Bigger releases will have the option to upgrade. But we're looking at at least two years between big releases, and if I'm completely honest... it'll probably be longer!

A task list is personal. A project system becomes part of how you think. If you trust an app with your commitments, deadlines, plans, and unfinished work, there should be something reassuring about the arrangement. Buy it once. Use it as long as you find it useful.

That does not mean Athena will never evolve. It will. The plan is for Athena to grow alongside the larger Olympus suite. Artemis is being built for notes and journaling. Hermes is being built around email and emotional health. Apollo is planned around calendar and time. These apps are meant to talk to each other and become more useful together.

But Athena is not a teaser trailer for a subscription ecosystem. It's designed to be a real app that functions without any of the others that will come. (Though I hope you love it enough to purchase the rest when they arrive!)

If Athena fits the way you work, you should be able to buy it and keep using it without wondering what it will cost next month. That feels normal to me.