Enough

The software industry has a favourite word, and it is not 'finished'. It is 'recurring'. A subscription turns a product into a relationship, and then slowly turns the relationship into a rent. You stop owning the thing and start paying for permission to keep using it.

We did not want that for Elba. A privacy tool that asks you to keep trusting us, month after month, is a privacy tool that has already made its first compromise. We want to sell you the island, hand you the key, and close the gate behind you. What happens after that is between you and the folder.

So Elba is €49 once. Not because subscriptions are immoral, and not because we are above making money. But because the right shape of this particular tool is a single transaction. You buy it, you own it, it stops asking you for things.

There is a second part to this, and it is the date in the license: 1 January 2030. Four years after launch, Elba becomes open source under MIT. Not because we ran out of things to sell, but because we will have made enough.

'Enough' is an unfashionable word in business. It implies a stopping point, a place where more is not better. But we think it is the right word for a tool that is supposed to protect you from being squeezed. If we are still trying to extract value from Elba in 2030, we are probably extracting value from you in ways we promised not to.

Mortalware, we call it. Software with a planned end to its commercial life, not to its usefulness. The price falls each year because the remaining time we have the right to sell it falls each year. By 2030, that right reaches zero. Elba is not sold; it is released.

We hope this is good for you. It is also good for us. A business that knows when to stop is a business that does not have to keep inventing reasons to exist. We can build Elba well, sell it honestly, and then let it belong to the world. That is the kind of company we want to be: one that makes a thing, charges for it once, and knows when it has done enough.