Notebook · 29 May 2026 · 6–7 min read · Alpesh Patel

The real maths.

A typical subscription mileage tracker bills around £85 a year. Five years of that is £425. That’s the maths most people don’t do before they tap subscribe. So here it is, slowly.

The numbers, plainly

Let’s start with what a category-leading subscription mileage tracker actually costs. MileIQ’s public pricing has hovered around £5–£8 a month on a personal plan, or somewhere near £85 a year if you take the annual rate. Prices change. The model doesn’t. Here’s what you pay if nothing changes for five years:

Five years isn’t a long time to keep tracking your mileage. Many people we’ve spoken to have been on the same tracker for closer to ten. Doubling the column gives you a real number: somewhere north of £800 for what was, at its core, a simple utility app.

What the £425 buys

Here’s the unromantic part. Most mileage trackers do four things:

• They run in the background and capture trips from your phone’s motion data.
• They let you sort each trip into business or personal.
• They calculate the figure your tax authority would let you claim.
• They export those records when you need them at tax time.

That’s the whole product. The technology behind it — CoreMotion on iOS, the equivalent on Android, the per-country tax rate, a CSV exporter — isn’t free to build, but it isn’t a research moonshot either. Once it’s built, the marginal cost of one more user using it is somewhere between negligible and actually negligible.

So what you’re paying £425 for, over five years, isn’t mostly the software. You’re paying for the existence of a venture-backed company with an office, a sales team, a marketing budget, a customer-success function, a board, and a recurring-revenue narrative that the board wants to see go up and to the right.

What pay-once looks like instead

If you take the same software and price it as a single in-app purchase — let’s say £14.99 — the comparison gets blunt:

That £410 isn’t a marketing number. It’s an arithmetic one. Over five years of business mileage tracking, a person who switches to a pay-once app keeps four hundred pounds. Over ten, somewhere near a thousand.

The hard question isn’t whether that’s good for the buyer. It plainly is. The hard question is whether the seller can stay in business charging once for a thing they paid to build.

How a small studio can actually charge once

The honest answer comes in three parts.

One: overhead. Keepwright doesn’t have an office, a sales team, a customer-success organisation, or a marketing budget that looks anything like a venture-backed competitor’s. The Director writes the code, runs the support inbox, and reads every App Store review. That isn’t a temporary stage we’re going to grow out of. It’s the model. The price needs to be small because the studio is small; the studio can stay small because the price is small.

Two: durability. Each app is built to keep working without us behind it. That sounds like a contradiction with the “Director runs everything” line, and it isn’t. The apps work offline by design, with no account system, no cloud back-end, and no server we have to keep paying to run. If Keepwright went quiet for a year, your Mileage Tracker would still capture your trips, still calculate the right figure, still export to PDF. The cloud-bill cost of one user is zero. The cloud-bill cost of 100,000 users is also zero, because we built it that way.

Three: the right number of customers. A subscription business at £85/year needs the same person to renew, year after year, for the unit economics to work. A pay-once business doesn’t need anyone to renew. We just need to sell to more people. Once. The maths flips from retention to distribution. We’ll cover whether that’s actually easier in a future piece. For now: it’s a different game.

Where the maths breaks

Pay-once isn’t infinitely scalable. There are three obvious places it breaks, and we’ll be honest about them now rather than later.

• It breaks when the product genuinely needs a server — collaboration, sync between users, real-time anything. Mileage tracking doesn’t. Plenty of categories do, and they’re not our market.
• It breaks when the regulator changes the rate every year and the app has to ship a new version forever. Tax rates do change — the UK AMAP rate just went from 45p to 55p in April 2026 — and we’re committed to shipping those updates inside the existing purchase. If a year arrives where that becomes more work than the original sale, we’ll have to say so. We don’t expect that year.
• It breaks when the company needs a venture-style return. We don’t. Keepwright is a UK Ltd, registered at Companies House under 17244061, with one Director and no outside capital. There is no exit number we’re building towards. The plan is to ship apps people keep.

The point of the maths

None of this is supposed to make you angry at MileIQ, or any other subscription tracker. Those companies are well-run and well-funded and answer to people the Keepwright studio doesn’t answer to. They are doing exactly what their model asks of them.

The point of the maths is to give a reader who’s about to tap subscribe the chance to see what they’re committing to first. If you do that arithmetic and you decide the subscription is worth it — that’s a fine answer. There’s nothing wrong with paying £85 a year for a service you trust. We just think the people who’d rather pay once should have a serious option.

That’s the whole pitch.

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