Why I Built a Word Processor With No Subscription

I switched to Mac a few months ago. I’d been on Windows for years, and the move felt long overdue. New machine, fresh start, all that.

Then I needed to write something.

Yeah, I know. Ridiculous. You’d think that would be the easy part. A Mac, surely, has good writing software. Right?

It does. Kind of. But not really.

The Options

Pages is fine. It’s actually pretty good. But it’s a lot of app for opening a .docx and editing a few paragraphs. It’s built for layouts, for brochures, for newsletters. Not for someone who just wants to type words into a file.

TextEdit exists. I’ll give it that. It can do bold. It can do italic. That’s about where the excitement ends.

LibreOffice can do anything. If you can find it. Under seventeen menus that each look like they were designed by a different person who never once checked what anyone else was doing.

And then there’s Word. Which is excellent, honestly. It does everything. You just have to give Microsoft $99.99 every year to use it.

Ninety-nine ninety-nine a year. For a word processor. That runs on your computer. That doesn’t need servers, or cloud sync, or real-time collaboration with strangers. It just sits there on your disk, opening files, letting you type.

The Math

Microsoft 365 Personal is $99.99 a year. The Family plan is $129.99. Over five years, that’s about $500 to $650 for software that doesn’t require any servers to run.

I’m being a bit unfair. Office includes a lot. Cloud stuff. Collaboration. The ability to work on a document with five other people at once. That’s real infrastructure and it costs real money.

But most people just want to open a Word file and edit it.

A subscription makes sense for Slack. It makes sense for Figma. Those things need servers running constantly. A local word processor doesn’t need any of that. It’s just code on your computer. Your files live on your disk. When you close the app, the app closes. There’s almost no infrastructure cost.

The Ulysses Thing

There’s a writing app called Ulysses. Beautiful app. Indie, well-designed, the kind of thing people loved.

In 2017 they switched to subscription-only. The reaction was instant. Everyone who had paid $50 once, years ago, suddenly needed to pay $6 a month to keep using the thing they already owned. Some people left. Some never came back.

Technically their argument made sense. Subscriptions fund development. You need money to build things. But it told users something: we care more about recurring revenue than about you using this forever. Those aren’t always the same thing.

So I Started Building One

I’m Tomasz. I live in Hove, UK (actually, don’t mind me, that’s a local joke). I have ADHD, which means when something bothers me enough, I either forget about it in ten minutes or build an entire application to fix it.

The word processor situation bothered me enough.

Here’s the funny part. While I was building Verso, I kept discovering other options. iA Writer. Ulysses. A whole list of distraction-free writing apps. Good apps, some of them. Every time I found one I’d think: well, maybe I should just stop and use this instead.

But none of them were quite right. They were either too opinionated about how you should write, or they wanted a subscription, or they were Markdown-only, or they couldn’t open a .docx without making a face about it. I kept going because I felt like I was onto something. A word processor that just does the obvious thing and gets out of the way. No philosophy. No workflow religion. Just a good, fast, native Mac app that opens your files and lets you write.

I remembered word processors from years ago. You opened them. They opened. You typed. They saved. That was it. No accounts, no onboarding wizards, no “what’s new in version 47.” Just a blank page and a cursor.

Maybe that’s nostalgia. But I don’t think so. I think those editors were simple because the problem is simple. You have words. You want them in a file. The end.

Somewhere along the way, word processors decided they needed to be platforms. And platforms need subscriptions.

The Honest Bit

When I charge once, I have to make an app so good that people want it forever. They buy it, I never see them again. If it’s broken or slow or abandoned, they have no reason to open it. I have every reason to keep it good.

With subscriptions, you just need people to not cancel this month. The incentive structure is different. It doesn’t have to be evil. It’s just that a word processor costing $70 a year has to find ways to make you feel like you need to keep paying. Add features so it seems worth the renewal. Make it slightly harder to leave.

One-time pricing is honest in a way I like. Either you built something people want, or you didn’t. No recurring revenue to hide behind.

The Trade-off

I should be upfront. Verso will probably update slower than Word. I might not add every feature someone asks for. I’m one person at a desk with a cup of coffee and too many browser tabs open.

But a word processor doesn’t need to evolve that fast. The thing it does is settled. Open file. Type words. Save file. Done. Anything beyond that is probably feature creep.

Word needed to become everything to everyone. Verso doesn’t.

The Deal

Verso costs $14.99. Once. No subscription.

You pay once and own it. Your files stay on your computer. No account. No cloud. Nobody’s trying to keep you subscribed.

It’s a simple deal. You pay a small amount. You get a word processor. I get enough to have made it worth building. The app doesn’t stop working if you stop paying. It doesn’t nag you. It doesn’t try to convince you that you need cloud collaboration when you just need to write.

That means I’m betting the app is good enough that you want it. Not that subscription inertia keeps you around. That’s a harder bar. I like it.

If you write on a Mac, I think you’ll like it too.