Ninety-Nine Dollars to Exist. Not Once. Every Year.

I want to be calm and considered about this. I am not going to manage it.

I've put a week into Inkwell — ATProtoKit wired in properly, a content pipeline that actually renders Standard.site publications the way they're meant to look, capsule buttons I'm finally not embarrassed by — and the second I went to check what it'd take to put it in front of one single other human being, I hit a number. Ninety-nine dollars. Per year. Not for the app. For the right to be allowed to show anyone the app exists.

Let that sit for a second, because I don't think it sits long enough with most people before they shrug and reach for their card. This isn't a one-off cost of doing business. It's rent. Annual, recurring, indefinite rent on the privilege of having built something. Stop paying it and the thing you made gets pulled off the shelf within days, regardless of how good it is, regardless of who's using it, regardless of the fact that you already built the entire thing with tools Apple gave you for free.

The Bit I Genuinely Cannot Get Past

It isn't really the money on its own, though a subscription fee landing the same week as a heatwave has a very particular way of making everything feel personal. It's the bundling. Apple lets you write code, run it, test it on your own hardware, for nothing — that part is generous, almost performatively so. Then the exact same company turns around and tells you that showing your work to literally anyone else is a separate product, sold separately, billed annually, and not refundable if you can't make rent on it next year.

I build most of my actual work on AT Protocol, where putting something in front of people and building it are the same act. There is no separate toll booth. Nobody's standing at the door of the network charging admission for the privilege of existing on it. And then I go to ship something on iOS and remember that the entire model over here runs on exactly that toll booth, dressed up in language about "membership" and "support" as if I'm joining a gym rather than paying to not have my own work locked in a drawer.

What That Ninety-Nine Dollars Is Actually For

Let's be precise, because precision is the only thing that makes the anger useful instead of just noise. The fee buys nothing to do with making the app. It buys App Store Connect access, TestFlight, a listing with your name on it, and the right to ask Apple's review team to look at the thing you've already finished. That's it. You could finish Inkwell to a polished, shippable, genuinely good state on a free Apple Account and never see a single one of those things unlock. Development is free. Existing publicly is not. Those are two different products wearing one fee.

What Doesn't Evaporate, Whatever Apple Charges For It

None of which changes what's actually sitting on my phone right now, working, doing exactly what I built it to do. A week of effort into something real isn't undone by a paywall sitting after the finish line rather than before it. It's a working demonstration of exactly the skills I'm about to need in front of someone hiring for them this autumn, and a demonstration that actually runs is worth considerably more than a description of one in a CV nobody reads properly. The fee is the cost of shipping. It was never the cost of having built the thing, and conflating the two is precisely the trick the bundling is designed to pull.

There's also a door Apple doesn't get to lock: open-sourcing it, the way I do with most of what I build, and letting it exist in front of people without going anywhere near App Store Connect at all. That doesn't put it on anyone's home screen. It does put it somewhere other than a drawer, which was rather the entire point of the fee I'm currently declining to pay.

So: Inkwell works. It lives on exactly one phone right now, behind exactly one toll booth I haven't paid yet, in a heatwave that is doing absolutely nothing to improve my mood about either fact.