I tried to buy my way out of subscriptions.
It came with one.

My feeds would not stop selling me smart AI recorders. Clip one to your phone, capture every conversation. There are a dozen of them now. After months of the same ad, I caved. I knew better. I bought it anyway.

I told myself this one was different. Hardware, not software. A thing I would own. €120, mine. No monthly bill, no company holding the off switch.

It worked for about a minute. Long enough to learn I needed their account, their app, and a plan. I was on the free tier. Free?! I bought the hardware. The actual deal, it turned out: €120 once to own the thing, and a subscription, forever, for permission to use it.

There is a word for this now: enshittification, Cory Doctorow's name for the slow squeeze. Good to you at first, then worse on purpose, until all that is left is the logo. The buy button was a lie. I rented a brick.

Then it dawned on me. I had bought a brick I never needed. My phone already recorded fine. So two things head for landfill instead of none: part of the ~2,500 kg of e-waste I will produce in my lifetime.

This was never about one gadget. You do not buy things anymore, you rent them. Click buy and you get a licence, not property. It is revocable the moment the subscription lapses, the company pivots, or the servers go dark. You paid. You just never owned it.

I thought the recorder was the bottom. Then I found the toilet seat. A smart seat that reads your blood pressure while you sit: $199 for the hardware, the first year of service included, then about $20 a month to keep your own heartbeat legible to you. Measured in your bathroom, on a seat you own, held on a server you do not. Stop paying and the seat is a seat.

That is where renting ends up. Not a laptop, not a car. A toilet. Nothing is too dumb, too private, or too bolted to your floor to be turned into a monthly bill. It is getting out of control.

So I built yapyap. It records a conversation, writes the transcript, labels who spoke, and drafts the write-up. All of it runs on the computer you already own. There is no account, and no archive of yours on a machine of mine. Some recordings happen away from your desk. yapyap Go handles those on its own, and hands the take over when you are back.

€69, once. Every update included. The app is never billed twice. One person, no funding, no investors waiting to be paid back. Nothing to log into, nothing to cancel.

That price works for one reason. The transcription runs on your machine, not on mine, so a new customer costs me nothing to serve. A company that pays for your inference has to bill you every month. I do not have that problem, so I do not have that excuse.

Here is the line I hold to. You pay for work the software does. You never pay for access to your own data. A subscription bills you in the months you never open the app. €69 does not.

Owning the recording is only half of it. You should own the write-up too. In yapyap a lens is a way of reading a recording: minutes, action items, quotes, whatever you need. Write your own, share it, install one somebody else made. The lens travels between people. Your audio never does.

And the part I care about most: if I lose interest, run out of money or get hit by a bus, your copy keeps working. For good.

yapyap outlives me.

yapyap is closed source today, and that is my call, for now. But if I ever stop, the code goes public so someone can continue even if I will not.

That is not a marketing promise. It is the whole point: what you own should not depend on the person, or company, that made it.