Software you own

This is not a complaint about subscriptions in general. Plenty of them are fair, and we pay them like everyone else.

A subscription makes sense when a product costs money to deliver every month. If it runs on a company's servers and keeps a live service going for you, that is a real recurring cost, and a monthly price covers it. A hosted inbox or an offsite backup works that way.

A desktop app does not. It runs on your own computer. Once it is installed, it costs us nothing for you to keep using it next month. Charging a recurring fee for that is charging rent on something you already have. That is the case we won't ship: a local tool billed monthly, as if it were a service.

Concretely, here is what you get when you buy a Sunset Mesa Software app:

• ✓ One purchase, no recurring charge. You pay once for the version you buy. Nothing renews.
• ✓ No metering, no gates. Nothing is billed per use, and no feature is locked behind a live service we could switch off.
• ✓ The work happens on your machine. The deterministic transforms run locally and never touch the network. When you use an AI transform, your text goes straight to the provider you chose, not to us.
• ✓ No kill switch. We won't disable a version you paid for.
• ✓ A two-device, cross-platform license. Install on two machines, Mac and Windows if you like, and move the license between them yourself.

One honest detail: the app checks your license when it activates, and from time to time after that, to stop a single license from being shared by hundreds of people. It never sends us the text you transform, and it keeps working offline through a grace period.

A major new version might be a paid upgrade some day. If that ever happens, it will be optional, and the version you already own will keep working exactly as it does now.

A lot of tools like this run on one platform only. Ours run on both Mac and Windows, and we treat that as a requirement rather than a bonus. The reason is personal. I move between Windows and macOS throughout the day, and I want the same tools on each, as much as that's possible.

There's an honest tradeoff here. An app built for a single platform can have a slight edge in native look and feel, and we'll grant that. We put real work into closing the gap. The app lives in the menu bar on Mac and the system tray on Windows, the global hotkey behaves the same way on each, and the smaller details are tuned per platform so it feels at home on both.

Rewire Text runs on both today, and the apps that follow it will too. Depending on interest, we may add other platforms later, such as Linux, ChromeOS, Android, or iOS.

AI features use a key you bring. You connect an AI account you already have, or make a free one in a few minutes, and the app talks to that provider directly. You pay the provider at their price. We add nothing on top.

We're not reselling you tokens or marking up your usage. There's no Sunset Mesa Software account to create, because there's nothing for us to meter.

This is less convenient than bundling some credits into a monthly fee, and we know it. The first-time key setup is a small chore. We chose it anyway, because the alternative is reselling you someone else's compute, with a reason to keep you paying us every month. We'd rather you pay the provider directly.

You don't have to send your text to an outside provider at all. You can run a local model on your own machine instead, so nothing leaves your computer and there's nothing to pay per use. This works with Ollama, LM Studio, and llama.cpp. The deterministic transforms never touch the network in any case.

Here is the part a sales page would skip. Selling something once is a harder business than renting it forever. Recurring revenue is steady and predictable. One-time sales are neither. For a one-person studio, that is a real risk to take on.

So here is how this is meant to stay alive without sliding back into a subscription. The studio grows by reaching new customers, and by building more apps over time, so Sunset Mesa Software becomes a small suite of tools instead of one product propped up by a monthly fee. Once in a while, a major new version may be an optional paid upgrade. That's the entire plan. No usage caps quietly steering you toward a higher tier, and no feature held back today so it can be sold to you as a service tomorrow.

If you're being asked to trust that the software you bought will keep working, it's fair to know who's making the promise.

Sunset Mesa Software is one person. I'm Mirko Froehlich. Before starting it, I spent 13 years at Google, most recently as a Senior Engineering Manager on Google Drive, and over a decade before that across startups as a full-stack engineer. I've built and shipped real software for a long time, and I plan to keep doing it.

There's more about the studio on the about page.

Rewire Text is the first Sunset Mesa Software app, and where this shows up in a real product. It's a system-wide text utility for macOS and Windows: select text in any app, press a hotkey, pick a transform, and it's replaced in place, using the transforms described above. One-time $29, no subscription, bring your own key.

See Rewire Text →