Why memoir. has no subscription

I'm tired of subscriptions. Of buying a physical object and then having to check which parts I can use, which parts need a premium account, and how much owning it will cost me every year.

Cars are a particular sore point for me. Imagine spending €30,000 on one, paying it off for years, paying for insurance on top, and then finding another €10 monthly fee for a connected feature. Ten euros might seem small next to the price of the car. To me, that extra charge feels like an insult.

And I keep getting that same feeling from things I never used to associate with a monthly bill. A tracker for the dog, a ring to understand how you sleep, a camera for your home. It feels as though every corner of life can have a premium version.

There are concrete examples: Tractive requires a plan for its trackers' cellular connection; Oura reserves analysis features for paying members; Ring offers cloud recording with a subscription, while allowing live video without one.⁴⁵⁶

Those services don't all do the same thing or have the same costs. A tracker with a cellular connection has expenses my frame doesn't. I can understand why a fee exists and still be tired of collecting them.

Because they all look small when you see them separately. Two euros here, five there, “just ten a month.” But they all come out of the same account. As an example, five subscriptions at €10 a month add up to €600 a year. Keep them for five years and that's €3,000, on top of what you paid for the devices. And you still have to keep track of what you're paying for, what renews, and what you lose if you cancel.

I was going to do it too

When I first imagined memoir., it had a subscription. I put it in the business model almost by default: a connected product, some servers, a fee. What you're supposed to do.

One day I was ranting about having to pay a subscription for my car. And I asked myself a fairly uncomfortable question: then why are you doing the same thing?

I can't, in good conscience, charge someone every year to see the photographs in their own home if I can sustain the service by including it in the price of the frame. I don't want to look at a photo frame and think about what it's costing me that year. It seems absurd to me.

So I did the maths to see whether I could sell memoir. another way. And I dropped the subscription.

What it costs to keep memoir. running

memoir. is an e-ink photo frame you can send pictures to over WhatsApp. There are servers behind it: they handle requests, process images for the display, store them, and let the frame download them.

That costs money. Right now, the infrastructure costs roughly US$1,200 a year for more than 200 connected frames. Those are my current figures, rounded, and I pay the entire amount out of my own pocket: I haven't applied for AWS credits yet.

Using 200 frames as a reference:

US$1,200 ÷ 12 months ÷ 200 frames = US$0.50 per frame per month.

And that's on AWS, including a managed database. I'm also paying for the convenience of not administering everything myself. I haven't squeezed every last cent out of the infrastructure. I could explore a self-managed setup with a provider such as Hetzner, taking on more of the operational work. The current setup already includes paying for that convenience.

Those 50 cents aren't the full cost of looking after a customer. My time, software maintenance, and dealing with problems count too. But they put the claim that running servers forces you to charge every buyer a subscription into perspective.

To give a sense of scale: US$20 allocated to infrastructure is equivalent to 40 months at that average cost. Three years and four months. That's an example of how part of a purchase price can fund future service, not a guarantee of service duration or a claim that there's a separate US$20 fund for each frame.

My estimate for 1,000 frames is a budget of around US$2,400 a year. If that holds, we'd be at about US$0.20 per frame per month. That's a projection, not a bill I'm already receiving or a ceiling costs can't exceed.

AWS credits can help too

AWS offers startup credits that can cover usage of eligible services. Each award has its own expiry date, typically one or two years depending on the package. It's also possible to apply for further awards if you continue to meet the programme's requirements.³

I think that, by working through the opportunities with an account manager, I could potentially line up successive awards over roughly four years and substantially reduce what I pay for infrastructure during that period. It's an option I want to pursue, subject to approval, amounts, and dates; I don't have four years secured.

Credits can buy time to establish the business. But when they expire, the costs remain: you also need a budget for paying for the service without them.

Selling products pays ongoing expenses too

A company that sells scissors has salaries, warehouses, customer support, and products that go wrong. Those expenses still exist after you take your scissors home. They're funded by the margin on what the company sells.

This isn't an exotic idea. In its 2025 accounts, Logitech includes warranty and customer support costs in its cost of goods sold. Work that happens after the purchase is part of the product's economics.¹

There are examples among connected frames too: Aura includes core features and photo storage without a mandatory subscription.² That doesn't tell us its margins, but it does show that a recurring fee isn't the only way to offer this service.

I want memoir. to make money selling frames. I want someone to enjoy theirs, recommend it, buy another as a gift, or choose an accessory they find useful. Each new sale needs to leave a margin after its own costs and contribute to keeping the business running.

Of course that means continuing to sell and managing the money properly. It also means considering what happens if sales fall. A product business has those responsibilities even when it doesn't bill the same person every month.

Asking about the future is fair

Someone on Reddit told me that, without a subscription, my servers would eventually go dark and the frame would become a paperweight.

I understand the concern. You're buying an object to keep in your home for years. You want to know what it depends on and what would happen if the person making it stopped.

The numbers explain how I intend to keep the service running. They don't remove the dependency: today, sending and processing photos through memoir. uses our servers. Charging a subscription wouldn't, by itself, guarantee that a company stayed in business either.

The technical solution I have in mind for that scenario is to process the image on the phone and send it to the frame over local Wi-Fi, without going through memoir.'s servers. That's a viable way to preserve the basic ability to display new photos. It's part of the contingency plan, not a feature I'm currently offering buyers.

That basic mode wouldn't retain WhatsApp delivery or the cloud photo library. The proposal doesn't include automatic photo rotation either. Keeping the ability to put a new photo on the frame would be useful, but it wouldn't be the same experience as the connected service.

Earning trust means explaining that, as well as explaining the bill.

The decision I've made

Some subscriptions make sense. What I don't want is to accept that every object I buy should come with another one. Or use servers as an automatic explanation without first working out what they cost and how I can pay for them.

I want to make money too. I want to sell frames, pay myself for my work, and make memoir. a business I can sustain. And I want to do that without asking someone for an annual fee to keep sending photos to a frame they've already bought.

I needed to do the maths to make that decision. The reason I started doing it was that I didn't want to pay another subscription for something like this either.

When you give your mum a frame, you want her to see the photos. The holiday, the grandchildren, the one you've just taken that you know she'll love. I don't want that gift to come with another renewal someone has to keep an eye on.

I already have enough subscriptions to pay as a customer. With memoir., I get to decide what I ask of the people who buy from me.

And I've decided not to add another one.

— Williams

References

1. Logitech International, Form 10-K, fiscal year ended 31 March 2025, Gross Profit section. ↩
2. Aura, Common Questions Before & After Ordering Your Aura Frame, accessed 11 September 2026. ↩
3. AWS, Applying for AWS Activate Credits: A step-by-step guide, sections on expiry and successive applications; 4 June 2026. The four-year horizon is a possibility proposed by the founder, not a duration guaranteed by AWS. ↩
4. Tractive, Subscription plans — Frequently asked questions, cellular connectivity and plan requirements; accessed 11 September 2026. ↩
5. Oura, General FAQs, limited functionality without membership; accessed 11 September 2026. ↩
6. Ring, Understanding Ring Protect subscriptions, cloud recording versus live video; Australian regional documentation accessed 11 September 2026. Prices and plan names are not extrapolated to other markets. ↩