Why I stopped paying monthly for a stand reminder app

A few months back, I did one of those quarterly subscription audits. You know the kind. You open the App Store, scroll through the active subscriptions tab, and slowly start frowning. By the time I got to the bottom, I had counted seventeen recurring charges. Seventeen.

Some of them made sense. Music streaming. iCloud storage. The note-taking app I actually use every day. Fine.

Most of them did not. A weather app charging $2.99 a month. A clipboard manager at $4.99 a month. A habit tracker I forgot I'd installed at $3.49 a month. And, the one that pushed me over the edge, a stand reminder app at $4.99 a month.

Sixty bucks a year. To remind me to stand up.

When did this become normal?

I'm old enough to remember when buying software meant a one-time payment. You paid $20, you got the app, it was yours. Updates came when they came. Sometimes you paid for a major upgrade, but mostly you just used the thing you bought.

Then SaaS happened, and recurring revenue became the default for serious software. That part I get. Adobe Creative Cloud needs ongoing infrastructure. So does anything with cloud sync, AI inference, a backend team. Subscriptions for those make sense.

What snuck up on me is when subscriptions colonized the rest of the App Store. Tiny utilities. One-shot tools. Apps that ship a feature, then run quietly forever. Suddenly those wanted monthly payments too. And we let them.

The math doesn't work

Let's actually do the numbers on the stand reminder. Five bucks a month. After one year, that's $60. After three years, $180. After five, $300.

For perspective, $300 is what you'd spend on a decent ergonomic chair. Or a standing desk converter. Or about a hundred copies of Standro at $2.99 each. For a timer with notifications.

And here's the kicker. The app didn't change in any meaningful way over the time I had it. Same notifications. Same settings. Same UI. I was paying ongoing rent on functionality that had been complete on day one.

The hidden tax of subscription fatigue

Beyond the money, there's the cognitive load. Every subscription is a small ongoing relationship. You have to remember it exists. You have to track when the price hikes. You have to deal with the trial-expiring emails. You have to feel slightly bad every time you open the app, because you're vaguely aware you should either use it more or cancel it.

Multiply that by a dozen subscriptions and it adds up. Subscription fatigue isn't really about the dollars. It's about the mental footprint. Every recurring charge is a small drag on your attention.

Industry surveys keep showing the average household now juggles around a dozen recurring digital subscriptions across services and apps, and the number keeps climbing. None of us signed up for that as a lifestyle. It just happened.

When recurring fees actually make sense

I want to be fair. Subscriptions aren't evil. There are categories where they're the right model.

Anything with a server cost. Cloud storage, sync, multi-device backup, AI calls. Someone is paying ongoing infrastructure bills, and that someone shouldn't be the developer alone.

Software with a real team behind it. Major platforms with regular updates, security patches, customer support. The price funds the people.

Things that improve materially over time. AI tools right now are a good example. The model gets better. The features get smarter. You're paying for forward motion.

A local timer that tells you to stand doesn't fit any of those categories. It's done. It works offline. There's no server. There's no infrastructure. Charging recurring rent for it is just charging recurring rent.

What I switched to

After cancelling, I went looking for an alternative. Free options exist. I tried a couple of the popular ones. The full-screen overlay style didn't work for me, and the barer options felt a bit too stripped down.

Eventually I found Standro, which is also the app I now build. (Yes, I'm aware that's convenient. I built it because I couldn't find what I wanted, then I figured other people might want the same thing.) It's $2.99, one time, on the Mac App Store. No account. No subscription. No upsells. You buy it, you own it, it runs in your menu bar forever.

I'm not saying it's the only good option. I'm saying that for a tool this simple, paying once and being done is the model that should exist. Three bucks, no strings. The fact that this feels notable in 2026 says more about the App Store than about the app.

A better question to ask

Next time you're about to subscribe to a small utility, ask yourself this: if the developer disappeared tomorrow, would the current version of this app still be useful to me?

For most local utilities, the answer is yes. The app works. It doesn't need new features. The "ongoing service" you're paying for is mostly the right to keep using software that already does its job. That's not a service. That's a tax.

And then ask: would I pay $30 once for this, instead of $5 a month? If yes, the developer should be offering you that option, and they're choosing not to. That's worth knowing.

The audit, again

I redid the audit last weekend. I'm down to nine subscriptions. The ones that earn it stayed. The ones that didn't are gone. I replaced a few with one-time-purchase alternatives that do the same thing, sometimes better.

The savings are real but honestly not the point. What changed more is the mental space. Fewer little fees. Fewer "your trial is ending" emails. Fewer apps I have a vaguely guilty relationship with. The Mac feels lighter. So does the inbox.

If you're staring at your own subscription list and feeling the same thing, do the audit. Cancel the small ones first. Replace the ones you actually use with one-time alternatives if they exist. You'd be surprised how many do.

And if you're paying monthly for a stand reminder, you have full permission to cancel today. Your back doesn't care about the pricing model. It just wants you to stand up. I wrote a related piece on why most reminder apps miss the point if you want more on that side of it.