You Can Now Buy a Single App Instead of the Whole Menu
Sixty-three of the 128 apps can now be bought on their own, from $19.99 to $29.99. Here's the arithmetic against the membership, and the cases where a single purchase is the better call.
Sixty-three of the 128 apps on the menu now carry a price of their own. Twenty-nine sit at $19.99, thirty-three at $29.99, one at $24.99, and each of those app pages has a Buy button under it with a line that says the purchase is yours to keep on one device.
A single purchase is a real option, and sometimes it's the right one. The arithmetic decides it faster than any argument.
What the menu looks like today
The 128 apps fall into three groups.
Sixty-three can be bought outright. Most of the big document and creative tools sit in the top tier at $29.99: DocCafe, SheetCafe, SlideCafe, CremaStudio, PagePress, LatteX and BrewCAD. Twenty-nine more, including NoteCafe, PDFCafe and PassBrew, are $19.99. NitroNet is the odd one at $24.99.
Sixty come only with a membership. Their pages say the app "is not sold separately" and point at the plan instead. TouchCafe, PomoLatte, TinyPDF, TinyVideo, MokaStudio, Barkeeper and TickerBar are in that group, along with most of the utility shelf.
Five are free to keep whatever you decide: ChessCafe, FileShipper, Pixpresso, TinyImage and TorrentMilk. No account, no card, no trial clock.
One app against the whole menu
Solo Cup is $3.99 a month, or $1.99 a month billed yearly at $23.88 charged once a year.
A $29.99 app therefore costs more than twelve months of every app on the menu. Divide it out and one purchase covers about fifteen months of the membership. The cheapest buyable tier, $19.99, is ten months. No tier beats a year of everything, and the reason is the plain one: that's what the two things cost.
Family Roast widens the gap. It's $7.99 a month, or $3.99 a month billed yearly at $47.88, and it covers up to five computers. Two $29.99 purchases come to more than a year of that, and they buy you two apps instead of 128.
When buying the one app is the right call
You need exactly one app and nothing else on the menu appeals to you. You'd rather pay once than keep a charge alive, even a small one. You like a price that's final. All three are good reasons to press Buy.
There's a subtler case. A subscription is a relationship with a company, and some people would rather not carry a dozen of them, or even one. A one-off purchase closes that relationship the moment the card clears.
What you give up is everything else, including the sixty apps that have no standalone price at all.
When the membership is the obvious answer
Two apps and the arithmetic flips. Two $19.99 purchases come to $39.98 against $23.88 for a year of everything.
It flips faster if the apps you want are membership-only, because then there's no price to compare against. If TinyPDF or TinyVideo is the thing you need, the membership is the only way to get it. The menu bar tools are mostly in that group as well, and a clipboard history, a Pomodoro timer, a battery readout and a screen dimmer together would run to more as separate purchases than as one membership, if they were sold separately at all.
It flips again the moment you change computers. A one-off purchase covers one device, while Family Roast covers five, and each computer you sign in on takes a licence slot that's freed the moment you remove that device.
What "yours to keep" means here
The line on the app page reads: one-off purchase, yours to keep on one device. That's a permanent licence for the copy you bought, rather than a rental or a trial.
A licence is one kind of staying power. The file format is the other, and this menu leans on both. The apps write ordinary documents, spreadsheets and markdown into folders you chose, so the work outlives the licence that opened it.
Where a single purchase makes the most sense
If you're going to buy one app, buy the one you'd otherwise rent. DocCafe at $29.99 is the clearest case, a native .docx editor for people whose only office need is opening and saving Word files. PassBrew at $19.99 covers another, a password manager that reads and writes KeePass .kdbx files instead of one company's vault. LatteX at $29.99 handles the third, LaTeX documents with no TeX distribution to install.
Each one replaces a monthly charge somebody already pays, and that's the test worth running before you press Buy. When no subscription is going away, and you want two or three things from the menu, the yearly plan undercuts a single purchase.
The free five cost nothing either way
ChessCafe, FileShipper, Pixpresso, TinyImage and TorrentMilk are free to keep, membership or not. Download them first. They're a fair test of whether these apps suit you, and they cost nothing to try.
The short version
One app you'll use for years, and nothing else appeals: buy it once.
Two or more, or anything from the sixty apps that have no standalone price: take the membership, and take it yearly, where it works out at $1.99 a month.
The menu is at getapps.cafe/menu and the plans are at getapps.cafe/membership. The 7-day trial adds a card when it starts and charges nothing until it ends.
If you want the longer version of this argument, The Whole Menu Now Costs $1.99 a Month covers the price change itself, One-Time Purchase vs Subscription works through the breakeven maths for a single tool, and How to Audit Your Mac App Subscriptions in One Afternoon is the list to make before you decide.