You’re going through your bank statement. Line by line, the way you do maybe once a quarter when you feel financially responsible. And there it is: $9.99, recurring, from a company whose name you recognise in the way you recognise the name of a town you drove through once. You used the product. You don’t anymore. You forgot to cancel. Or rather — and this is the more honest version — you didn’t forget so much as you never got around to it, because every time you thought about it you were doing something else, and the task went back on the mental pile, and $9.99 is below the threshold of action for most people most of the time.
This is not an accident.
The $9.99 threshold is well understood. Subscription businesses know it. The pricing isn’t arbitrary — it’s calibrated to sit just below the level of pain that would motivate cancellation in an ordinary month. Pair it with a cancellation flow that requires three decisions and two email confirmations, and you have a product that retains paying users whose practical engagement ended months ago. In the software industry, these users have a name. They’re called “the long tail.” They represent serious money.
The entire architecture of retention-first software points in the same direction. Streaks. Notification cadences. Progress tracking. Personalisation that requires ongoing engagement to be useful. Features that are valuable but that only work if you’re logged in, if you have history in the system, if you’ve been a user long enough to have accumulated something worth losing. Every one of these is a mechanism for making leaving feel like more work than staying. They are designed that way, explicitly, by people with job titles like “growth” and “engagement.”
This is not necessarily sinister. Companies need revenue. Revenue requires retention. Retention requires features. The design follows from the economics, and the economics follow from the decision to build a recurring-revenue business. The issue isn’t the motivation — it’s what the motivation produces. It produces software that is optimised for your continued use rather than your immediate need. Software that wants something from you after the job is done.
Imagine a different kind of product. One that was indifferent to whether you came back. One that had no streak to break, no accumulated data to threaten you with, no re-engagement email to send at a calculated interval after your last login. One that, when you’d finished using it, simply… stopped. No goodbye. No “we miss you.” No reactivation offer three months later.
This is not a utopian fantasy. It’s just software that doesn’t have a server to justify.
If a tool runs locally — if it processes your file on your machine, keeps no record of you as a user, stores nothing in the cloud — then it has no mechanism for retention even if it wanted one. There’s no account to charge. There’s no data to lose. There’s no history to hold. The relationship between you and the tool is purely transactional in the good sense of the word: you had a need, the tool met it, the transaction is complete. Come back tomorrow. Don’t come back. The tool doesn’t know the difference and doesn’t need to.
This changes the incentive structure for building the tool in the first place. Without retention metrics to optimise for, the only thing worth optimising is whether the tool does the job well. Sharp edges. No friction. No dark patterns, because dark patterns require something to retain. The product succeeds when it’s useful, not when it’s sticky.
It’s a deliberately smaller ambition. Not a platform. Not an ecosystem. Not a product that becomes a habit. Just a tool that does one thing, reliably, for as long as you need it, and asks for nothing in return.
fwip does the job and gets out of the way. No account. No subscription. No reason to stay longer than you need to. Try it →