Buy a tool, not a subscription

The subscription trap

Think about the last subscription you cancelled. Chances are you kept it for months after you stopped using it — partly out of habit, partly because cancelling felt like a chore. That's not an accident. The monthly tier is designed to keep charging you whether you show up or not.

We didn't want to build a product that makes its money from the months you forget about it. So GabForge has no subscription tiers at all.

How pricing actually works

Two simple ideas:

• The basics are free, forever. The assistant and the everyday personas sit inside the Free Covenant. For a lot of people, that's the whole product, and they'll never pay a cent.
• Specialist plugins are bought one at a time. Need a heavy-duty bookkeeping plugin, or a specialist that writes legal-style documents? You buy that plugin — not a membership that bundles forty things you'll never open.

There is no "Pro" plan, no "Business" plan, no feature held hostage behind a tier. You own the tools you choose, the way you'd own a drill instead of renting a hardware-store membership.

A concrete comparison

Say you run a small shop and you need help with invoices for three busy months a year.

• The subscription way: £15/month for a "Business" plan, all year. That's £180, and £135 of it covers months you barely touched it.
• The GabForge way: the free assistant handles your day-to-day for nothing, and you add the invoicing plugin only when you need it. You pay for the tool, not the calendar.

Why we can afford to do this

This only works because we own our machines (see Why we run our own machines). Owned hardware is a fixed cost, so we don't need a recurring subscription to cover a recurring API bill. The economics let us be honest: charge for real tools, give the basics away, and never punish you for a quiet month.