Why there's no subscription in Tilea — a note from the person who made it
Fifteen collages free, then one small purchase, forever. No ads, no watermark, no account. Here's the reasoning, including the part where this is a worse business decision and I made it anyway.
Every collage app I tried before building Tilea did the same thing at the end. I’d pick the photos, drag the layout until it felt right, tap Save — and there it was: a watermark in the corner, or a screen asking for $39.99 a year to remove it. The collage took forty seconds. The pricing screen took longer to close than the collage took to make.
I’m one person. I don’t have a growth team or a pricing consultant. What I have is a strong opinion about that moment, so Tilea is built around not having it.
The deal, in one paragraph
Your first fifteen collages are free. Not a trial with half the buttons greyed out — the whole editor, at full resolution, with no watermark. After fifteen, if you want more, there is one small one-time purchase. It unlocks unlimited collages, forever, on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and your family gets it too through Family Sharing. That’s it. Nothing renews. Nothing expires. There is no account to create, because there is no server for one to live on.
Why not a subscription
The honest answer is that a subscription would make more money. Everyone in this category charges monthly, and the ones that do earn far more per user than a one-time $5 ever will. I know this. I did the arithmetic. I’m still not doing it.
A collage is a thing you make occasionally. Vacation photos in August, the kids’ first day of school, a before-and-after of the kitchen. Charging monthly for something you use six times a year is not a pricing model, it’s a bet that you’ll forget to cancel. I don’t want to make that bet against the people using my app.
There’s a second reason, less noble. When money comes in monthly, every product decision starts bending toward “what keeps them subscribed”. Pop-ups about features you haven’t tried. Reminders. A little friction on the way out. I’ve watched good apps become worse through exactly that gravity. Taking the subscription off the table means the only way Tilea earns anything is if the collage you make is good enough that you want to make a sixteenth one. I like that pressure. It points at the right thing.
Why not a watermark on the free tier
Because it’s your photo. A watermark on a free export isn’t a feature, it’s a hostage. And a picture with a logo stamped on it is a picture you won’t send to anyone — which means the app never gets shared by the only channel that actually matters for something like this: someone seeing a collage they like and asking what made it.
So the free collages are clean. If you make fifteen and never buy, that’s fine. Genuinely. You’ll have fifteen good pictures and no bad feelings about where they came from.
Why no account, no ads, no analytics
Tilea doesn’t have a server. Your photos never leave your phone — not for the AI-assisted layout, not for anything. That’s not a privacy policy I wrote to sound good; it’s a limitation I built in on purpose, because the moment photos go somewhere, someone has to promise to look after them, and I’d rather not have to make that promise.
Ads were never on the table. An ad next to a picture of your kids is exactly the “clutter” the app exists to remove.
What this means for you
If you never pay: fifteen collages, no strings. If you pay once: everything, on all your devices, forever, and I’ll keep shipping updates you don’t have to pay for again. If Apple adds a new iPhone size or I ship a layout I haven’t thought of yet, it’s yours.
If you’ve read this far and you already have the app, the most useful thing you can do isn’t buying it — it’s leaving a rating on the App Store. Small apps live or die on those. Ten seconds, and it decides whether the next person even finds this page.
— Evgeny, who makes Tilea. support@tilea.app, answers everything.