The first thing any consumer app company gets asked is, "Will it be free?" We said no early, on purpose, and then defended that decision every month for a year. Here is the math and the mindset behind that call.
Before we wrote a line of Swift, we spent a weekend just using other lottery apps. What we found:
There were two polar extremes in the category — the grimy free-with-ads stack, and the outright gambling industry apps. There was no clean, quiet tool in the middle. That gap was the product.
A free app has to choose what it sells. If you aren't selling the product to the user, you are selling the user to someone else. In a category this close to gambling, the "someone else" is usually the gambling industry. We didn't want any part of that business model. Once you rule that out, you are left with two viable options: charge for the app, or give up on shipping it.
So we set a budget backwards from a sustainable run rate. To keep two people working on this seriously, plus infrastructure and the occasional designer, we needed a few thousand paying subscribers. At $2.99 per month, the arithmetic worked. At $4.99 per month, we would have needed fewer, but we would have priced a lot of casual players out. Less than a lottery ticket felt right. A lot of the copy on the Pricing page was reverse-engineered from that one sentence.
We chose a price that is less than a lottery ticket so nobody can honestly say we overcharged for a calculator. That constraint tightened everything else.
A lot of "no ads" apps technically have ads — they're just called "sponsored slots" or "partner content." We wanted to hold ourselves to the stricter version:
The practical effect is that our App Privacy label is boring. There is no advertising identifier, no user-level behavioral data, no broker relationship. Boring is the whole pitch.
Ad-supported apps optimize for sessions. They need to keep pulling you back in to serve more impressions. Subscription apps can optimize differently. The number we actually watch is "did a monthly subscriber use the app around a big drawing?" If yes, the subscription is earning its keep; if not, the subscription isn't worth paying for. That frames every product decision as an honesty question: does this feature help somebody think more clearly during a big-jackpot week, or does it just create noise?
Subscription is not a free lunch either. The fall-offs:
A clean tool people trust is worth more, for longer, than an ad-riddled app that everyone uses once and forgets. Charging a couple of bucks a month buys us the license to say no to compromises a free app couldn't refuse. The result is quieter, stranger, and — we think — better than anything else in the category.
If it isn't worth $2.99 a month to you, don't pay. That's not marketing; that's the actual test. And if it is, the math is back in your favor: less than a ticket, for a tool that shows you the real number behind every ticket.
We'll keep an eye on the business side of this thesis publicly. If something changes, we'll write about it — before it changes, not after.