A subscription is not a pricing preference. It is usually a confession about costs.
If an app sends your voice to a server to be transcribed, every sentence you dictate costs the vendor real money — GPU time, bandwidth, storage. Those costs arrive every month for as long as you keep using it. No single payment can cover a bill that never stops, so the price has to recur. The subscription is not the business model bolted onto the product; it is the product's architecture showing through.
What changes when the model runs on your Mac
Apple silicon is fast enough to run a good speech model locally. When it does, the per-sentence cost lands on hardware you already bought. We are not paying for your transcription, so we do not need you to keep paying us for it.
That is the entire argument. $29 once is not generosity — it is what the number looks like when the marginal cost of you using the thing is zero.
The same decision, seen from the other side
The reason we can charge once is the same reason your audio never leaves your machine. A cloud model has to hear you to work; a local model does not. Privacy and the price are not two features that happen to sit well together — they are one decision viewed from two angles, and you cannot have either without the other.
So why is there a $2.99 a month option?
Because $29 up front is a real barrier for some people, and we would rather they used Aly than didn't. It buys the same software. It is a rental rather than a purchase: it stops when you stop paying, it has to check in periodically to know it is still paid for, and it earns no free second copy to give away.
If you intend to keep using Aly, the licence is cheaper after about ten months and never expires. We would rather say that plainly than quietly route you toward the recurring one.
“How do you stay in business, then?”
New customers, mostly — the same way software was sold for decades. It means we have to keep making something worth recommending, rather than making it annoying to leave. We think that is the healthier incentive, and it is certainly the more honest one.
It also means a paid major version could exist one day. If that happens, the licence you bought keeps working exactly as it does now. Forever means forever.