Why we refuse to sell a subscription

Every advisor we spoke to said the same thing: charge monthly. Recurring revenue is the religion of modern software. So let us explain why we said no.

Subscriptions optimize for the wrong thing

When you charge monthly, your incentive quietly inverts. You stop asking “is this the best tool a radiologist could own?” and start asking “what keeps them from cancelling?” Those are not the same question. The second one leads to lock-in, artificial cloud dependencies, and features designed to be sticky rather than useful.

We did not want to spend the next decade optimizing a cancellation funnel.

Medical dictation is especially vulnerable to that inversion because it sits in the middle of the working day. Once a radiologist has built templates, macros, microphone habits, and reporting muscle memory around a tool, leaving becomes painful. A monthly vendor benefits from that pain. The more irritating it is to switch, the safer the revenue looks.

That is not the relationship we wanted with radiologists.

One-time pay is a promise

Paying once is a different relationship. It says: here is a finished tool, it is yours, and we earn your next purchase by being good, not by holding your workflow hostage. It is how you bought your keyboard, your monitor, your stethoscope.

It also forces discipline on us. If we cannot bill you again next month, the software has to be worth owning today.

That discipline changes product decisions. We cannot hide the core value behind a renewal cycle. We cannot make the cloud a billing machine if the job can be done on the radiologist’s own device. We cannot ask you to keep paying because speech recognition is treated as a hosted service by default.

RadMyk runs locally because that is the right architecture for private dictation. The one-time price follows from that architecture. Once the model is on your machine, there is no per-report processing cost for us to recover every month.

The math should be boring

RadMyk is a one-time purchase, no subscription. That is the whole purchase for basic ownership. No monthly seat fee. No per-word meter. No annual renewal to keep dictating.

That does not mean subscriptions are always wrong. If a hospital buys an enterprise reporting platform with peer review, structured reporting, central administration, and findings management, a recurring contract may make sense. That is a platform. It has ongoing service work behind it.

Basic voice-to-text is different. It is an input method. When the radiologist speaks, words should appear where the cursor is. That should not feel like a utility bill.

”But how do you make money?”

The same way a keyboard manufacturer does. People buy it. They tell colleagues. Departments standardize on it. New radiologists qualify and buy their own. A good one-time product sells itself for years.

We would rather have a hundred thousand radiologists who own RadMyk and recommend it than ten thousand who resent a monthly charge.

There is a trade-off. A one-time product has to stay useful without holding customers in place. It has to win on recommendation, not renewal pressure. That is a harder business in some ways, but it keeps the incentives clean.

The deal is simple. If RadMyk is useful enough, buy it once and keep using it. If it is not, do not. That is the entire business model. No asterisk.