Local-first, and what a subscription actually buys

Handled is free on one device, with no account: tasks, notes, saved links, your calendar, and capture from anywhere — plus meeting notes when you record one, transcribed locally. Handled Pro is $3.99 a month or $24.99 a year, and what it unlocks is sync across your devices, full cloud history, and the connections that run through our servers.

That split is not a marketing decision that happened to land on a clean line. It is the line itself: what runs on your device is free, and what runs on ours is paid.

Why that line and not another one

The usual freemium shape is to pick a feature people need, remove it from the free tier, and wait. It works. It also means the free version has to be kept deliberately worse than it could be — and every improvement to it becomes a conversation about whether it will hurt conversion.

Costs are a better line than needs. Transcription on your iPhone costs us nothing no matter how many meetings you record, so there is no reason to meter it. Storing and syncing your data costs us money every day you keep using it, so it is the part that has to pay for itself. Nothing in the free app has to be held back to protect the paid one, because the paid one is not competing with it.

What this means when you stop paying

• Everything on your device stays on your device, in full. The app keeps working.
• Sync between devices stops.
• The cloud copy narrows back to the last 30 days.

No export deadline, no read-only mode, no countdown. A local-first app that holds your data hostage is not local-first; it is a hosted app with a cache.

The constraint this puts on us

If the free app is genuinely complete on one device, then Pro has to be worth buying on its own merits, every month, to someone who already has a working app. We cannot make the free tier worse to sell it. We can only make sync more reliable, and connect more of the tools you already use.

That is a harder business to run than the alternative. It is also the only version of this we would want to use ourselves.