How we picked our subscription price

Pricing software is weird. There's no formula. You just pick a number, put it out there, and see if people think it's fair.

With LumaSpace we went back and forth for weeks. Here's the thinking, including the parts we got wrong the first time.

The options we considered

LumaSpace is a live video-wallpaper app for macOS. People download it for free, get a curated free selection, and pay only if they want the full library. So the question was never "will they pay to start" — it was "what's a fair price for ongoing access to scenes we keep adding to."

One-time purchase ($29): Simple and honest. But wallpaper content is ongoing. We add new scenes, re-encode footage with per-scene quality tuning, license new music. A one-time price means we stop getting paid while the costs keep going.

Monthly subscription ($4.99/mo): This is what a lot of apps do now. We almost went with it, but $60/year for wallpapers felt steep, and steep is the kind of thing people cancel out of resentment rather than disuse.

What we chose ($2.99/mo or $19.99/year): Low enough that you don't really think about it. High enough that we can keep filming new content and paying the composers. The yearly works out to roughly $1.67 a month, which is the nudge we'd want if we were the ones deciding.

For reference, here's how the same library reads across the structures we looked at:

• $29 one-time — cheapest year one, but no runway for new scenes.
• $4.99/mo — ~$60/year, which is more than a wallpaper app should ask.
• $2.99/mo — ~$36/year if you stay month to month.
• $19.99/year — the one we'd pick ourselves.

Why there's no countdown

We deliberately skipped the time-limited demo a lot of apps run. A countdown creates a clock, and a clock creates urgency, and urgency is exactly the feeling we don't want attached to wallpaper.

The free tier does the job a countdown is supposed to do, only better. Anyone can download LumaSpace and use the curated free selection for as long as they like — live wallpapers at 720p plus the widgets, no account required. No countdown, no "your access ends in 2 days" email. Use it across different days, different moods, see how a moving desktop actually feels over a week or a month. If the free scenes are enough, keep them. If you find yourself wanting the rest of the library, Pro is there. We would rather earn the upgrade than time it.

What you're actually paying for

Pro unlocks the full library: a hand-picked set of cinematic 4K scenes, around sixty of them, each re-encoded in-house rather than dropped in at whatever bitrate the source happened to be. They're tuned scene by scene and kept small enough to live comfortably on disk.

The other half of the price is restraint. LumaSpace is careful about battery — it only does work when the desktop is actually visible, and leans on the Mac's hardware video decoder rather than the CPU, which we wrote up in why LumaSpace uses so little battery. It also drives each display independently, at its own resolution. We think a wallpaper you forget is running is worth paying for.

What happens if you cancel

The app keeps working until your current period ends. We don't lock you out the second you hit cancel. After that, it reverts to free mode with the limited curated selection. No nag screens, no countdown timers, no guilt.

If we can't convince you the scenes are worth three dollars a month, that's on us, not on you.