The first version of SipNote — my caffeine and beverage tracker for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch — shipped at $2.99, one-time. No subscription. No account. No free trial that auto-rolls. No "Pro+ Plus Ultimate" tier.
In a category where every well-known competitor charges between $1.99/mo and $4.99/mo, that decision required some defending. Here's the version of the argument I told myself.
What I was looking at
I'd been using caffeine trackers on-and-off for about two years before I started building one. The market is dense:
- HiCoffee — $1.99/mo or $14.99/yr
- RECaf — $4.99/mo (one of the most-loved in indie circles)
- Caffi — $2.99/mo
- Caffiend — $1.99/mo
- Caffeine App — $3.99/mo
Plus a long tail of free apps that cap features after 30 days and force an upgrade.
I tried each of them for at least a week. They're all solid apps built by people who care. None of them did the two things I wanted:
1. Stop making me type the same drink 50 times a month. Every app's solution to logging is "tap the drink, set the size, save". By drink #50 that's a 4-second tax that adds up to multiple minutes a week of friction. The friction is why I kept abandoning trackers after 3 weeks.
2. Acknowledge that 70% of my caffeine isn't coffee. I'm half-Chinese; my weekly intake is roughly half oolong milk tea, plus the occasional Red Bull when shipping a feature too late. Every Western caffeine app treats "caffeine" as a thin wrapper around "coffee", with maybe an "energy drink" category bolted on. Boba and milk tea don't exist. My favorite Yakult-style drinks don't exist. The KFC iced coffee I sometimes buy doesn't exist.
So I shipped two technical features the others didn't have — snap-to-log via on-device OCR, and a drink dataset that includes 30+ Asian beverages with realistic caffeine ranges.
Then I had to decide what to charge.
The subscription pull
Subscriptions are the gravity-well default for indie apps in 2026. Every founder podcast, every App Store optimization course, every Twitter thread will tell you why:
- Predictable revenue. $2.99 one-time → user pays you once, ever. $2.99/mo → user pays you 12× the first year and keeps paying. The compound difference is enormous.
- Easier to keep developing. When the cash flow is recurring, your incentive to maintain the app and ship updates is permanent. With one-time pricing, every active user is a fixed-cost liability — they get support emails forever from a sale that closed once.
- Easier to fund growth. A subscription app can sustainably pay more for ads, more for App Store keyword bids, more for refunds. A one-time app can't justify any of that math.
- Easier to graduate to "ARR pitch decks" if you ever want to raise money or sell.
These are all correct arguments. I read them carefully. I almost shipped with a $1.99/mo subscription option as the headline price.
Why I didn't
A few things kept biting at me.
One. The kind of person who needs a caffeine tracker is the kind of person who already pays for Notion, ChatGPT Plus, Apple One, Spotify, Calm, Headspace, Strava, AllTrails, and a podcast app of choice. The subscription budget is full. Adding mine means displacing one of those. I don't think SipNote earns that displacement, and I don't want to spend my product energy fighting for it.
Two. Caffeine tracking is bursty usage. Most people use a tracker intensely for 4-8 weeks, then drop it. Some come back when they're worried about sleep again. A subscription is fundamentally hostile to bursty usage — the user feels guilty for not opening the app, then cancels, then re-subscribes 6 months later and feels weird about it. With a one-time purchase, they own it, leave, and come back with no friction.
Three. I trusted the on-device OCR to be the moat. If snap-to-log is good enough that the app is meaningfully easier to use than every alternative, I don't need to lock people in with recurring billing. They'll just keep using it.
Four — and the one that mattered most. I'm building Obelisk Club as a portfolio of 13 small apps. If every one of them is "buy a subscription to use the thing", that's a portfolio I personally would never trust. The thing that makes a portfolio worth following is when the apps feel owned, not rented. Charging once is the most direct way to communicate that.
What it cost
I want to be honest about the trade-offs, because the case for one-time pricing usually gets made by people pretending it has no downsides.
Lower lifetime revenue per active user. If a SipNote user would have paid $2/mo for 18 months on a subscription model, that's $36 in revenue. They pay me $2.99 once. The gap is ~$33 per user — call it 11x lower over the medium term. This is real money.
No predictable cash flow. I can't tell you what next month's SipNote revenue will be. Subscription apps can.
Harder to keep updating in 3 years. When v2 lands in 2028, I'll either need to ship it as a new app (annoying), gate v2 features behind a v2 unlock (annoying for existing users), or just keep maintaining v1 for free indefinitely.
Lower acceptable customer acquisition cost. If a SipNote user generates $2.99, I can never sustainably spend more than ~$1 acquiring them. ASO and word-of-mouth are basically my only channels. No Facebook ads, no influencer payments, no aggressive AppLovin growth campaign.
These costs are real. I made the trade because the alternative felt worse — but if SipNote doesn't earn enough at this price to keep me building, I'll have to revisit it eventually.
Why I made Pro a one-time unlock instead of a subscription tier
Pro is $0.99 extra (so $2.99 + $0.99, or whatever the bundle settles at) for:
- Sleep-friendly bedtime alerts
- Full history beyond 30 days
- Complete drink map across all time
- CSV export and backup file
- Apple Watch quick-add templates
- Unlimited custom drinks
Notice the pattern: every Pro feature is a power-user accumulator. They get more valuable the longer you use the app — more history, more places, more custom drinks. Subscriptions don't add value to existing data; they only add ongoing features. One-time pricing for accumulator features is honest.
If I were to ever charge ongoing — and I might — it would be for genuinely ongoing services like a backup-to-personal-cloud option, or a HealthKit sync subscription tier where I'm actively maintaining integrations. Not for "let me show you data you already gave me".
The first month's numbers
I'll publish them on the blog at Day 30 from launch. Whether they validate or contradict this whole essay, the numbers go up. That's the deal I've made with this blog — honest receipts, both directions.
If you want to give SipNote a try, it's on the App Store now for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch:
Get SipNote on the App Store →
If you want to argue with this pricing logic, my email is obeliskclubclub@gmail.com and I read all of them.
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Coming next on this blog:
- A technical post on how the on-device OCR pipeline actually works
- Day 30 numbers from the SipNote launch (regardless of outcome)
- A piece on why I'm building the rest of the Obelisk apps without subscriptions either
Subscribe by following Obelisk Club on Twitter / X — newsletter form is in the works.
Frequently asked questions
How much does SipNote cost?
SipNote is free to download. The Pro unlock is $2.99 one-time — no subscription, no recurring charges, no auto-renew. Free tier includes the snap-to-log OCR, today's intake widget, and basic logging. Pro adds bedtime alerts, complete history beyond the current month, full drink map, CSV export, custom drinks, and Apple Watch quick-add tiles.
Is SipNote actually private?
Yes. All caffeine entries, photos used for OCR, and metadata stay on your device. The OCR pipeline runs locally via Apple's Vision framework — no photo or text is uploaded for processing. No telemetry SDKs, no analytics, no third-party trackers. Server-side: nothing. macOS's built-in App Privacy Report will show zero outbound connections from SipNote except StoreKit when you purchase Pro.
Does SipNote work without iCloud or an account?
Yes. SipNote does not require any account at all. Data lives in the iOS app sandbox. Optionally you can sync via iCloud Drive (end-to-end encrypted by Apple) if you want history available across your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
Why does SipNote include boba and milk tea?
Because Western caffeine trackers treat caffeine as a coffee-only concept and that doesn't match real consumption patterns for a lot of people. SipNote ships with 30+ Asian beverages — boba, milk tea, oolong, KFC iced coffee, bottled teas — with realistic caffeine ranges. If a drink you have isn't in the dataset, custom drinks let you add it (Pro feature) and email me to add it to the next update.
What's the difference between SipNote and HiCoffee?
HiCoffee is a mature, well-loved caffeine tracker that costs $1.99/month for Pro. SipNote is newer, charges $2.99 once, has on-device OCR snap-to-log (HiCoffee doesn't), and includes Asian beverages by default. HiCoffee has more reviews and a longer track record; SipNote bets on a faster log loop and one-time pricing. Detailed honest comparison: obelisk.club/sipnote/vs/hicoffee.