Lifetime license
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Danny Thys
There are many people, like me, who prefer not to be on a monthly / annual subscription, but pay once for life. So a kind of lifetime license for pro versions.
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Rustem Mussabekov
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We've carefully considered this request over the years, and our position remains the same:
we will not be offering a lifetime plan
.Here's why: Raindrop permanently stores close to a billion bookmarks as full webpage snapshots with AI processing on top. These costs are real and recurring — every saved bookmark costs us money every month it exists. A lifetime plan would mean promising unlimited service for a fixed price against costs that never stop growing. That's not a promise we can honestly make.
Every time I see a lifetime option in a product, it signals one of two things: either they need quick cash, or they'll eventually walk it back. We don't want to be either.
Our $3/month subscription is what keeps Raindrop alive, improving, and independent. It also means
we're accountable to you every single month — if we stop delivering value, you stop paying. That's a healthier relationship than a one-time transaction.
We truly appreciate the enthusiasm behind this request. If the subscription model isn't for you,
our Free plan is one of the most generous on the market
— unlimited bookmarks, folders, and tags, yours forever.Rustem Mussabekov
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acastrolagunes3
Frankly id rather pay for a service especially with all the work put in. But an alternate for those that want a lifetime they should try selfhosting. There are a few selfhosted bookmark manager but you dont get the features raindrop gives you.
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fkyndxfkrushka
I've had an account on this service for a long time, but I never even started using it because the free plan is limited, and for Pro I simply don't use the service enough. I actually rediscovered your service by accident recently, because I got an email newsletter about new features. I originally signed up because several pages I had bookmarked became unavailable. The sites are gone. I wanted to use your service to create a few copies of important pages, maybe around 10. And I'm not willing to pay for that. (Or if I pay for one month, make the copies, will they remain accessible on the free plan afterward?)
Subscriptions are also annoying.
If there were a lifetime plan for about $100, I would buy it. And I guarantee that, for example, my load would be lower than that of a free user. I bought 2 TB on pCloud 7 years ago, and over all that time I haven't even used 1 GB. It's just psychology. Same with Steam games: I have 2,000 of them, but I've maybe played 40 at most, and actually played, not just "launched to look", maybe 3–4. I just don't have the time or energy. But I'm glad I bought them.
Same here: I don't pay because I don't have the money "for the sake of 10 bookmarks". Especially since you could always introduce hidden limitations if you see that lifetime subscribers are abusing the system, and through the lifetime agreement ban them. Then they'd have to buy lifetime again.
Think about it. You could get $100, but instead you get nothing. And again, not many people are ready to drop $100 upfront.
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fkyndxfkrushka
Take LudwigGuru (you probably don't even know that service, right?) — they ran a lifetime promo and then removed it. I asked them to make an exception because I found out about the service later. But they also gave the usual small team excuses. In the end, I had a 2-year subscription, and they later changed it, basically cheating by reducing it to one year. Then they raised the price for the yearly plan as well.
So what happened? I spent $40 (that was the price for 2 years back then), but I could have spent $160 for lifetime. In the end, they lost me and also got a bunch of negative reviews for shady practices. And where are they now? I don't need them anymore because there are plenty of free alternatives now, like Claude, Perplexity, or Copilot. And they are even better.
And there's no guarantee that tomorrow I won't discover something like Notion (this isn't manipulation, just an example), or Obsidian, and realize that I can upload page copies to my lifetime pCloud with even more flexibility than Raindrop (if you believe the enthusiastic threads about Obsidian).
My point is that even $100 is like 3 years of subscription. There's no guarantee I won't find something else in a year and your servers will just forget about me, while you keep the $100. Otherwise, you get nothing.
Rustem Mussabekov
fkyndxfkrushka We offer one of the most generous free plans on the market — unlimited and packed with everything you need for a complete bookmarking experience. The heavier features, like petabytes of storage for permanent copies and AI processing, come with real infrastructure costs that we have to cover every month. That's why they're part of our paid plan — it's as straightforward as it sounds. And when you consider that those expenses recur month after month on our end, you can see why a lifetime plan simply isn't sustainable for us.
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fkyndxfkrushka
Rustem Mussabekov Come on, man, I run a business in a closely related field myself, and I know that everything you're pushing is just marketing talk. If those fantasies were actually true, you would've shut this project down a long time ago, because in reality only an idiot would have numbers like that.
We have plenty of examples, like pCloud, which was also founded by a Russian-born entrepreneur, who built a solid project based on lifetime subscriptions and shows stable numbers every year. And in his case, the petabyte-level figures are clearly real, not some bookmarked kilobytes dressed up as something bigger.
Rustem Mussabekov
fkyndxfkrushka I'm a Kazakhstan-born entrepreneur, and the costs are very real — we permanently store close to a billion bookmarks as full webpage snapshots (HTML, images, assets) with AI processing on top. Do the math.
pCloud stores static files you upload once. We fetch, render, and permanently host entire webpages — completely different cost model. Lifetime plans don't work when every saved bookmark costs us money every month it exists.
This is our final answer on this. We appreciate the feedback, but we won't be introducing a lifetime plan.
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mongrelStingy
Absolutely, lifetime or even 5year plan would be an instant buy.
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nkjakarta25
I can read many times that the monthly amount is low and due to lot of fees, cannot get lower.
Forget monthly then, just use annual amount.
I do prefer as well lifetime, but if not possible, which is respected and understandable, then annual is the way.
(Generally speaking about the lifetime, 1/3 of my lifetime subs have business closed and 1/3 chose to honor previous lifetime subscribers and stopped that model later for new subscribers, and 1/3 asked users to change to annual and stopped the lifetime model).
Regional pricing would be great, but I can understand it may be difficult to implement.
Multiple tiers, on the other hand, it's up to you, tiers per features, just give options to your happy users and everybody will be happier, the users and you, by welcoming new subscribers.
Regardless of this matter, a big thank you for your work, keep it up!
All
Mr. Mussabekov, if you choose to offer lifetime pricing, I would suggest creating an intermediate tier between Free and Pro (perhaps Plus?).
The Plus tier would be offered at both lifetime pricing and better regional pricing at $2/mo or $18/yr as Dancing_Rain excellently suggested below.
The Plus tier would include as many Pro features as possible while "capping" additional server cost over free tier to 50%. By having a tier that provides a lot of extra value but only modestly increases ongoing server cost, the additional recurring revenue from the Plus tier (including cannibalized from the Pro tier) could be enough to help pay for the additional long-term server cost of the Plus tier usage.
This allows you to offer low-cost, high-value premium features to more users — while still being able to offer the highest-cost premium features at higher (recurring) prices.
Over time, you could try to move more Pro functionality into Plus by serving it at lower cost with more client-side caching and local processing.
New, high-cost, cutting-edge features could conversely initially launch solely at the Pro tier. It's worth noting that your remaining Pro tier subscribers would likely be more price-elastic, allowing you to raise rates for Pro faster than for Plus.
I have a second suggestion: you could separate long-term, warm, and hot-tier storage costs from network/compute by offering a modest offline version storage limit (in GB) for the Plus tier.
You can do the same thing for compute costs by limiting offline crawl rate for Plus users.
Overall, this is good for users. They won't get the most server-intensive Pro features but they will get a lot more than free and they'll get the Pro features that become more affordable over time.
Note: Other than offline mode / full-text search, I don't concretely know what the difference is between Free and Pro because I have been paying annually since day one to support your excellent app and for full-text search.
Rustem Mussabekov
All: What exact Pro features you need?
Do you know any other alternative service costing $3 or less?
Do you know any other service with more generous Free plan?
Why $2, maybe $0.1?
As I mentioned earlier selling cheaper than $3 equals to giving it for free due to high fees for small transactions.
All
Rustem Mussabekov good point: I wonder
what pro features are needed by the users asking for lower prices?
I know your question is for everyone, so just my brief opinion: I think your current rate is quite reasonable at $3 per month (compare to: 1Password $4, Spark $8).
Overpriced examples:
Telegram Premium at $5 and Pocket, which no longer exists, at $5.You could probably charge $3.50 per month ($32 annual) and I'd still pay for it. But I live in the US in a high cost of living city (a haircut costs $50), so my perspective is on one end of the curve.
jonathanlima
Rustem Mussabekov I'd be completely fine having a reduced version of the current premium plan, especially with limited storage.
It's a trade-off - I get it LTD - but I must agree with certain limitations.
In my case,
- I wouldn't need the 10GB per month to store and upload stuff, I'd be okay with 4~5GB. (or any other term)
- Permanent Library: I'd be okay if I had a limit of items I could save permanently each month.
Another type of idea for LTD: TIERS
- Tier 1: <describe available features and limits>
- Tier 2: ...
Also, you may consider Limited openings (open for X days in a schedule you define)
--
just writing down some of my thoughts based on a few other apps I've seen out there.
For example:
- One Huge product that offers LTD: Proton Pass
- CanaryMail offers LTD
- MyMemo, Save.day offered LTD for a limited time using tiers through AppSumo.
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Adding to the last comment regarding currency:
In other countries the USD needs to be converted - in Brazil for example it is almost 6 BRL to make 1 USD. This elevates the cost for those places as well.
Rustem Mussabekov
jonathanlima Can you show me a similar app with cheaper price? Who reduce the price when it already a lowest on the market?
jonathanlima
Rustem Mussabekov
Similar cheaper (does not save copies of the pages)
- start.me (I've been using it as my homepage for a couple of years now) - I've got the lifetime deal. The subscription plans: Pro $24/yr (2/mo) or Team $30/yr ($2.5/mo)
- Bookmer - $30/yr
Similar - same price
- linkwarden.app $3/mo ← OpenSource
Similar - more expensive but with more powerful features:
- Fabric (Basic) ← Multiple AI tools, 50GB, etc - $4.67
- save.day ← $3.97
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One Time Purchase - to save backups of your pages
- GoodLinks iOS - $9.99
- Couch - Read Later iOS - $8.99
- AnyBox (someone already mentioned it below) - $39.99
Subscription Based:
- Sofa - Downtime Organizer - $30/yr
Rustem Mussabekov
jonathanlima
Raindrop - $3/m or $28/y (+ tax if applicable)
start.me - you can't pay monthly, plans starts from $25/y
linkwarden is $4/m, self hosting will cost you $3 - $5/m.
Bookmer also doesn't have monthly plan, only yearly 29 eur = $34/y
GoodLinks besides one time purchase have a subscription (wow, so you pay at least twice) - $9.99 + $5/y
Sofa $4/m
For Goodlinks, Couch and Anybox don't forget to buy a Macbook with an iPhone :)
Compared to Raindrop, most apps cost the same or even more. What truly sets Raindrop apart is that our Free plan gives you unlimited folders, bookmarks, and tags. And if Pro isn’t in your budget right now, that’s fine—you can stay on the Free plan for as long as you like.
jonathanlima
Rustem Mussabekov you asked for a list of apps, I brought them right here. Either you like or not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Honestly, why do you keep this thread open? I mean, if you don’t plan to have LTD, why you keep it open and keeps trying to prove LTD is not good? Everyone coming here is looking for lifetime clarification, not to be convinced to pay for yet another subscription.
Rustem Mussabekov
jonathanlima I’m still considering a Lifetime plan, but not sure in what form yet. Somehow this discussion shifted toward lowering the price, which I definitely don’t intend to do
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HoundRock
Rustem Mussabekov
Will definitely buy a lifetime subscription! Thank you for considering! Will follow this thread.
mizzyc
Rustem Mussabekov
https://rubra.com/ is free, so Raindrop isn’t actually the cheaper option here.
As for your question, “Who reduces the price when it’s already the lowest on the market?” — the answer is simple: any company with a solid business plan. Lowering the price can attract more paying customers and, in the long run, lead to greater revenue.
It’s very clear to me that it’s time for Raindrop to start investing in growth — hiring more people, accelerating development, and working towards stronger financial sustainability. Honestly, it’s impossible for one person to handle every role in a business and perform each one exceptionally well. For example, the way you handle customer support questions and suggestions, that when there is a reply at all, they often sound quite rude and ironical.
Any way, sharing my perspective about the pricing suggestions: I think that lifetime plans are totally not viable for a company, but you could consider a plan without all the unnecessary AI features, or even without file-upload storage (which I’ve been paying for monthly but never once used). A leaner plan like that could lower hosting costs and make the service more attractive.
Rustem Mussabekov
mizzyc Rubra features == Free plan of a Raindrop.
Lowering the price in our case is not a "solid business plan" because processing fees will eat up almost all revenue, I do not want to share exact fees we pay, but situation is roughtly the same for any payment provider, after some point lowering price means selling it for free.
Do you remember Pocket, Delicious? They have been a big company with many roles.
"you could consider a plan without all the unnecessary AI features..."
- we already have this, it called "Free" plan. Our Free plan is super genereous, no limits at all, just absent of premium features.
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lasnord7
Rustem Mussabekov Actually, I was hesitant to pay the annual subscription, but after reading several comments, most of them negative, I gladly decided to pay it. I support your project because it's creative, and you have the patience to respond to comments. Well done!
ismailsevik
The cheapest "read later" app on the market right now.
ismailsevik
I think the current price is quite reasonable and appropriate. Technically, it is not possible to give a lifetime license. This might make sense if it were an offline application, but it's not very useful for a service that is online and requires constant updates and has hosting fees.
mdaverde
ismailsevik It would be useful to bring in relatively large revenues in now rather than later. Revenues now can be invested into new features that increase the amount of monthly/annual paying customers later.
Dancing_Rain
I think instead of lifetime subs, cheaper subscription will be better. At least don't increase it for the time being.
Rustem Mussabekov
Dancing_Rain cheaper than $3/m?
Dancing_Rain
Rustem Mussabekov I read the thread and many people were suggesting lower pricing. So I thought that will be more viable than lifetime subs. I think people should understand that Lifetime subs are "fake" promises. They never hold in the long run and I don't believe them in this age and time. Around 2000s or 2010s they could be believed but now... Not a chance. Most of the times it feels like a pull out scheme. Where the dev will just gather as much as they can and leave. I am happy (and grateful) paying for a service one time if the service doesn't deal with cloud services but when storage and bandwidth comes into equation then lifetime is not "trustworthy".
I have seen many services, which did this. Like a certain music player, a vpn app, a password manager and many more like them. All of them have been very very famous. And they all ended up going back on their "life time plan" promises. Some sold the company to make it someone else's headache (new owner obviously removed the plan), some ended the plan after 3 months and didn't even refund the users who bought the plan. Some just stopped making the software and created a new version of the same software (legal reasons) which they sold as a subscription service. So you can use the lifetime version, that isn't being updated anymore, for 1000000000000 years. But if you want updates and more features then pay for their new app version through subs. (BTW they promised future updates with the lifetime plan but they revoked it later.)
So, I thought if it has to be something then price could be altered for certain events like discounts on different occasions. Or maybe better regional pricing.
Rustem Mussabekov
Dancing_Rain Yes lifetime plan is a lie. Price cheaper than $3/m will not work for us, because you probably know that we also need to pay taxes, fees, etc? Your $3 become $1 for us. Making price cheaper actually means giving it for free.
Dancing_Rain
Rustem Mussabekov Fair enough. Great product. One of the cleanest and most feature rich manager. I am happy paying the price if it means there are a lot of new exciting features to play with 😁. Keep up the good work.
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wayneallison
Rustem Mussabekov
60% overhead? That’s a LOT of overhead for SaaS …
All
wayneallison 60% sounds reasonable to me.
I worked at Microsoft for many years. If you look at our earnings, Azure's overhead is around 65%.
While we can't compare apples to oranges, I think few Fortune 10 companies could achieve better margin than Microsoft, given its strong vertical integration, incumbency, economy of scale, and reasonable mitigation of diminishing returns.
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vicasso
I'm in if the LTD is coming.
I like anybox pricing model!
Rustem Mussabekov
vicasso do not expect $39.99 lifetime pricing
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vicasso
Rustem Mussabekov Absolutely not! You may know your expenses better.
imquangdang
Rustem Mussabekov right here waiting for you
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