Why not a cheaper monthly subscription?

Because a subscription gives the app a reason to keep you, and an anti-scroll app that wants to keep you has a conflict of interest. A one-time payment aligns the app with you: it has succeeded when you stop opening it.

What happens at the end of the 14 days?

The app opens on the purchase screen. The wall keeps firing for one more week so you are not left unarmed mid-effort, then it stops until you buy. No card was asked for, so nothing is charged.

What if I change phones?

The purchase is tied to your App Store or Google Play account, not to the device. The Restore purchases button finds it on a new phone signed into the same account.

Why a habit app should be paid for once

The day I deleted my last blocker, it was not because of the wall. It was because of a line on my bank statement. A yearly renewal, at a price I had not kept in mind, for an app I had not opened in months.

I had stopped needing it. The app still needed me to stay.

A subscription needs you to stay

A subscription is an honest model for many things: a service that costs money to run every month, content that keeps coming, a tool you use every day for work. For those products, paying every month matches value received every month.

A habit app is not that. Its value is front-loaded: the first weeks, when the reflex is still strong and every wall counts. If it does its job, the value declines. You open it less and less. You no longer need it.

A subscription makes that success financially undesirable. The app has a reason to bring you back: one more notification, a counter, a streak you must not break. Not out of malice, out of structure. When revenue depends on the open, the whole product ends up serving the open.

What we refused

Trade the Scroll has no streak that resets to zero, no leaderboard, no feed, no accountability partner, no credits to earn. Each of those mechanisms was cut for a specific reason, and most of those reasons boil down to the same sentence: it gives the app a reason to hold on to you.

The pricing model is on that list. A subscription would have contradicted everything else.

What it looks like in practice

The first 14 days are free. No card, no account, no locked feature: you get the whole app, because a crippled version would not tell you whether the wall works for you.

After that, the app opens on a purchase screen. One product, 44.99 EUR, one time, on the App Store or Google Play. The wall keeps firing for one more week, so you are not left unarmed in the middle of an effort, then it stops until you buy.

Nothing renews. Nothing will be charged a year from now. If you change phones, the Restore purchases button finds the purchase on the same store account.

The price, frankly

44.99 EUR is the price of a tool that works, not of a service that lasts. We set it once, and it is written in one place for the app, the site and the store listings, so no page ever tells a different number. If you use it for four weeks and the wall lifts because you are under your target, the app did exactly what you paid for.

The wall lifts on its own, by the way. Four consecutive weeks under your target and it steps aside, with a single message to tell you. If you go over three days in a row, the wall comes back too. There is nothing to pay again.

What it means for us

One person builds this app, in France. A one-time payment is less money per user than a subscription that keeps running. That is a choice, and it has a flip side: no server to maintain, no growth team, no features that exist to justify the next charge.

In exchange, we can write the sentence on the home page without blushing: pay once, and we hope you stop needing us.

If that speaks to you, the FAQ answers the usual questions about the price, the trial and restoring a purchase.