When we were deciding how to charge for LoopBack, we spent weeks going back and forth between a subscription model and a lifetime payment. Subscriptions are the default for SaaS. They provide predictable revenue, fund ongoing infrastructure costs, and align incentives over time. We understood all of that. We chose lifetime pricing anyway, and it was not a default decision.
The first reason is practical: LoopBack is a browser extension, not a hosted service. The core functionality runs entirely on the user's machine. There is no server processing your screenshots, no cloud pipeline stitching together your prompts, no AI inference we are paying for on your behalf. When someone pays for LoopBack, they are paying for the software, not for compute time on our end. A subscription for software that runs locally is hard to justify honestly.
The second reason is philosophical. Developer tools that people genuinely rely on tend to be owned, not rented. Your editor is yours. Your terminal setup is yours. The extensions you install because they save you hours every week become part of how you work. We want LoopBack to be that kind of tool. A lifetime license means you can budget it once, install it, and stop thinking about whether it is worth renewing each month. It either earns its place in your workflow or it does not.
That said, lifetime pricing does create a real constraint: we have to build something people are happy to pay for upfront, and then we have to keep improving it to earn continued trust even after the transaction is done. We take that seriously. Our roadmap commitments include every future update for the life of the product. When we ship new features, existing customers get them automatically.
The Team plan follows the same logic but at a team scale. Five seats, one payment, shared workspace. Teams that adopt LoopBack for their review workflow do not want to worry about per-seat renewals when someone joins or leaves. The flat price lets team leads budget it as a tool purchase, not an ongoing line item.
We do charge separately for expanded team sizes beyond the base five seats. That is where our recurring revenue comes from, and it is a model we feel good about because it scales with genuine usage growth. You pay more only when LoopBack is demonstrably worth more to you because more people are using it.
Long term, we will keep building LoopBack as long as people are using it to get things done. Lifetime pricing forces us to stay honest about product value. It is a constraint we chose deliberately, and one we think makes us better at building the right things.