Why Unsubbedware
You’re renting everything now.
A PDF you need to sign. A video you need to trim. Photos to pull off a phone. None of it should cost a monthly fee — and none of it should live on someone else’s computer.
The drift to subscriptions
Software you used to buy once is now a monthly charge. The price goes up a little each year. Features you already had get moved to a higher tier. Stop paying and the app stops opening — even for the work you did while you were paying.
For big, evolving software with real running costs, a subscription can make sense. For an app that trims a video or fills in a form, it never did. Those jobs were solved twenty years ago by programs that ran on your machine and asked for nothing after you installed them.
Your files aren’t really yours
The subscription is only half of it. The other half is that your work now lives in an account. Your projects sit in a format only that app can read, on a server you can’t see, synced by rules you don’t set. Cancel, and you may get a 30-day window to export — or nothing.
That’s not ownership. Ownership is a file, on a disk, that you can copy to a USB stick and still open in ten years.
Most of these jobs never needed the cloud
Converting a HEIC photo to JPG happens on your CPU. Laying out photos on a sheet of paper happens on your CPU. Filling a PDF form, trimming a clip, exporting an STL — all local work. The cloud in these products isn’t there to do the job. It’s there to hold the account that holds you.
So we build them the old way
- Installs on your computer. A normal desktop app with a normal installer — one per app, no launcher.
- Keeps your data local. Files stay where you put them, in formats other programs can read.
- Works offline. The only time an app touches the network is to check whether a new version exists — and it asks before downloading.
- No account, no telemetry. Nothing to sign up for. Nothing phoning home about how you use it.
Free, funded by donations
Every app is free to download and use, for personal or commercial work, with no “pro” version held back. If an app saves you a subscription you were paying, sending some of that back is what pays for the next one.
To be straight about it: Unsubbedware isn’t a registered charity, so a donation isn’t tax-deductible. It just helps — it covers code-signing certificates, the download hosting, and the time to build and maintain the apps.
What Unsubbedware is not
- Not open source. The code is closed. What you can rely on is behaviour: the apps run locally and don’t make network calls beyond the update check.
- Not a support desk. One person builds these. Bugs get fixed as fast as one person can; there’s no SLA.
- Not trying to be everything. Each app does one job. If you need the deep end of Fusion or Acrobat, keep them — these are for the 90% of the work that doesn’t need the deep end.
That’s the idea. Here are the apps.
Five so far. More when the donations and the hours allow.