Why We Chose a One-Time Payment Over a Subscription

Astrea started with a genuine question: how can we easily access and make sense of our own data, without a subscription? Martin, Astrea’s co-founder, and I are two people who care about health and training, who like data, and who kept running into the same wall: every time we looked at what it would cost to actually understand our own bodies, the answer came with a recurring charge attached. So when it came time to price Astrea, the subscription model wasn’t the default we started from. It was the thing we were trying to get away from in the first place.

Quick digest

Astrea is a one-time purchase: you pay once and the app is yours, permanently, not a monthly or annual fee.

We’re bootstrapped, with no investors, so we don’t need recurring revenue to hit a growth target this quarter.

The average person underestimates their subscription spending by more than $130 a month, according to a 2022 consumer survey (C+R Research, 2024).

Popular wearables like WHOOP and Oura charge $70–$360 a year on top of the device itself, which stacks up over the years you actually use it.

We think checking your own vitals shouldn’t depend on whether you can keep affording a monthly fee, not when owning an Apple Watch and iPhone is expensive enough already.

We didn’t want to build something that punishes forgetting to cancel

Subscriptions have a specific failure mode: you sign up, you use the thing for a while, life gets busy, and the charge keeps coming long after you stopped opening the app. In a 2022 survey of 1,000 US consumers, people estimated they spent about $86 a month on subscriptions; when they actually itemized their statements, the real number was closer to $219 (C+R Research, 2024). Forty-two percent admitted they’d kept paying for a service they’d already stopped using. Almost a quarter said they felt overwhelmed by how many subscriptions they were juggling.

That gap between what people think they’re paying and what they’re actually paying isn’t an accident of memory. It’s the business model working as intended: a subscription is worth more to a company the longer someone forgets about it. We didn’t want Astrea to depend on that. If someone stops finding the app useful, we’d rather they simply stop opening it than feel like they’re being charged to remember to leave.

There’s also a regulatory story here that says the same thing from a different angle. In the US, the FTC’s “click-to-cancel” rule, finalized in 2024, existed specifically because cancellation flows had become so much harder than sign-up flows that it generated a rising stream of consumer complaints, from roughly 42 a day in 2021 to about 70 a day in 2024 (FTC, 2024). A federal appeals court later vacated the rule on procedural grounds, but the complaint data behind it doesn’t go away: enough people felt trapped in subscriptions that a federal regulator built a rule around it.

Germany, where we’re based, actually passed a law over it. Since July 2022, § 312k of the German Civil Code requires a permanent, unmissable “Kündigungsbutton” (cancellation button) on any website selling a recurring paid contract, with no login required to use it (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, n.d.). A year after it took effect, a nationwide audit of nearly 3,000 websites by the German consumer protection federation vzbv found only 42% actually complied, up from just 28% the year before (Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband, 2023). Lawmakers had to legislate a cancel button into existence, and a year later, most companies still hadn’t built one voluntarily.

Health tracking shouldn’t be priced like a luxury

Longevity and recovery data are genuinely useful; that’s the whole premise of what we’re building. But usefulness and access are two different things, and a lot of the wearable space prices as if the two don’t need to line up. WHOOP’s membership tiers, which bundle the device into the subscription, run from $199 to $359 a year. Oura sells its ring for $349–$499 upfront and then still requires a membership starting at $69.99 a year just to keep using it (WHOOP, n.d.; Oura, n.d.). Over five years, that’s a lot of money to keep checking numbers about your own body.

We don’t think good recovery data should be something you rent for as long as you can afford the monthly bill and lose the moment you can’t. One purchase, and it’s yours: no feature getting locked behind a higher tier next year, no login that stops working the month you decide to cut back on expenses.

Bootstrapping let us make this decision before the business model, not because of it

We’re not on a venture timeline, and that matters here more than it might seem. We don’t have investors we need to show a recurring-revenue chart to, so there’s no pressure to structure pricing around monthly active subscribers before we’ve even proven the product is worth using. That gave us room to ask a more basic question first: what’s the fairest way to charge for this, rather than what generates the most predictable revenue.

That doesn’t mean we’ve solved pricing forever. We’re a young company, and being honest about that matters more than pretending we’ve got it all figured out. A one-time price today reflects where the product and the company are right now, not a promise about every future feature or every future year. What it does reflect is a sequencing choice: build something worth paying for once, before worrying about how to charge for it twice.

Maybe we’re being naive, but we wanted to build something worth being part of

Between the two of us, Martin and I have spent decades in tech and in serious training, the kind of experience that could just as easily go toward maximizing a subscription funnel as toward anything else. At some point that started to feel like something worth putting toward a meaningful goal, not just a bigger number on a dashboard. We could have priced Astrea purely around lifetime value and what looks good on an investor slide. We asked a simpler question instead: what’s a fair, one-time trade for a tool that genuinely helps someone understand their own body.

We’re not against making money; a one-time price still has to cover real costs, including the time it took to build this, plus the ongoing hosting and tech tools that keep it running. But if maximizing revenue had been the honest goal, a subscription would have been the obvious answer, since recurring revenue is easier to forecast and easier to raise money against than a single upfront payment. We picked the harder version anyway, because we’d rather end up with a community of people who take their own data seriously and pass on what they learn than a slightly better margin. That’s worth more to us than the money we’re leaving on the table.

Call it naive if you want. We’d rather find out we were wrong about that than never try.

What this means if you’re considering Astrea

You pay once, and the core app is yours going forward, not something that stops working if you skip a renewal.
Founding Members lock in the lowest price the app will ever have, before it’s ever gone up.
We don’t sell your training data to make up the difference; the one-time price is the actual business model, not a loss leader for something else.
If we ever add something genuinely new and substantial down the line, we’ll be upfront about how it’s priced rather than quietly folding it into a new tier.

FAQ

If there’s no subscription, how do you pay for ongoing development, servers, and updates? The purchase price is calculated to cover that, not just the app as it exists on day one. We’re bootstrapped and small, which keeps our costs proportional to our size. Bug fixes and reasonable improvements to the app you bought are included; we’re not planning to hold basic functionality hostage behind a future paywall.

Could Astrea ever introduce a subscription later? We can’t promise the business will never change over the next decade. What we can promise is that if it does, it won’t be by quietly converting something you already paid for into something you now owe monthly for. Anything genuinely new would be priced and communicated separately and clearly.

Why is “Founding Member” pricing different from later pricing? Early pricing reflects that the app is still growing into its full feature set, and it’s a thank-you to people willing to buy in before the product is fully mature. Once major pieces are built out, the price reflects that expanded product for new buyers, but Founding Members keep the price they locked in.

Doesn’t a one-time payment make it harder to build a sustainable company? It’s a real tradeoff, and we’re not pretending otherwise. It means we have to earn each purchase on the merits of the product rather than counting on inertia to keep revenue flowing. We think that’s a better incentive to build something worth having, not a weaker one.

What happens to my data if I stop using the app? Nothing changes about your access or your data because you’ve gone quiet for a while. There’s no monthly charge running in the background that only reveals itself the next time you check your bank statement.

Sources

Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch [BGB], § 312k (Ger.). (n.d.). https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__312k.html

C+R Research. (2024). Subscription service statistics and costs [Survey report]. https://www.crresearch.com/blog/subscription-service-statistics-and-costs/

Federal Trade Commission. (2024, October 16). Federal Trade Commission announces final “click-to-cancel” rule, making it easier for consumers to end recurring subscriptions and memberships [Press release]. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/federal-trade-commission-announces-final-click-cancel-rule-making-it-easier-consumers-end-recurring

Oura. (n.d.). Oura membership. Retrieved August 1, 2026, from https://ouraring.com/membership

Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband. (2023, July 5). Kündigungsbutton: Umsetzung weiterhin mangelhaft. https://www.vzbv.de/pressemitteilungen/kuendigungsbutton-umsetzung-weiterhin-mangelhaft

WHOOP. (n.d.). WHOOP membership. Retrieved August 1, 2026, from https://www.whoop.com/us/en/membership

A note from us We’re Martin and Marina, Astrea’s co-founders. We’re both into data and serious about our own training, but neither of us is a doctor or a clinical researcher. The health and physiology claims in this article come from published, peer-reviewed research, not our own expertise, which is why every article ends with a Sources list above. If a claim doesn’t trace back to a real source, we cut it before it gets published.