Mac apps without a subscription: why every Monokern app is free or paid once
Monokern makes Mac apps you either download free or buy once — a RAW editor, a calculator, a music player and more. What each costs, and why there's no subscription.
More and more Mac apps now cost a few dollars a month, forever. Sometimes that makes sense: an app that runs servers, syncs your data or pays for cloud AI has costs that never stop. But a lot of apps that run entirely on your Mac have moved to subscriptions too, and many people are tired of it.
Monokern is a small studio making Mac apps, and none of them need a subscription. Each one is free, or something you pay for once and keep. Here is what each app costs, and the thinking behind it.
The apps
Chili RAW — a RAW photo editor and library. The full editor is free, with no time limit and no watermark: culling, RAW developing, masks, lens corrections and a searchable library. The Pro licence, $39.90 once with every future version included, adds the AI and film tools. Everything runs on the Mac.
Zahl — a plain-text calculator. Type maths, currencies, units, dates and time zones line by line and see the answers next to them. $5 once, for two of your Macs.
CoolCal — a calendar in the menu bar. Your month, agenda, next meeting and world clocks, with one-click Zoom, Meet and Teams joins. $5 once.
Konpo — a music player for your folders. Free. Gapless, keyboard-first, plays FLAC, and has the Winamp-era MilkDrop visualizer built in.
Media Spy — a media file inspector. Free. Shows the codec, resolution, bit depth, HDR format and more for audio, video and image files, without playing them.
Single Cycle Master — a wavetable creator. Free, for Mac and Windows. Pulls single-cycle waveforms out of recordings, chiptune files or synthesis and builds wavetables for Serum and Vital.
StepSnip — multi-page screenshots. Capture, annotate, reorder and export a PDF. It is sold on the Mac App Store, so it works a little differently: a free seven-day trial, then a $9.99 lifetime licence or $0.99 a month, whichever you prefer.
Why pay once
The apps run on your Mac and nowhere else. There are no Monokern servers holding your photos, sheets or music, so there is no ongoing cost to pass on. A one-time price is the honest price for that.
It also changes how an app gets made. A subscription app has to keep giving you reasons not to cancel. A pay-once app only has to be good enough that you’d recommend it.
What it means for you
- No account. None of the apps ask you to sign up.
- Your files stay yours. Chili RAW keeps your photos in their folders and never changes the originals; Konpo plays your folders as they are; Zahl’s sheets stay on your Mac.
- Free updates. Chili RAW Pro includes every future version, and Zahl and CoolCal come with free updates.
If something is missing or broken, the contact page goes straight to the person who made the app, and every message gets read.
Where to start
If you take photos, start with the free version of Chili RAW. If you grew up with Winamp, open Konpo and press ⇧⌘V. And if you still add up numbers in the Calculator app, give Zahl five minutes — it costs about as much as a coffee.
