Why Milkloft is one purchase, not a subscription

Milkloft is bought once. There is no subscription for the features on your phone, no account to create, and no server of ours holding your bags: the log lives on your iPhone and, if you want it on your other devices, in your own iCloud. That is a design decision before it is a price, and this page is the reasoning behind it, including the parts it does not promise.

A subscription is mostly a bill for a server

When an app charges you every month, some of that money is the work of keeping it alive, and a large part of it is infrastructure: machines that hold your data, keep it in sync, and stay up at three in the morning. That bill arrives every month whether or not anyone opens the app, so the price has to arrive every month too.

Milkloft never took on that bill. Your bags are stored by the phone itself. Syncing between your own devices runs on the private part of your iCloud account, which Apple already gives you and which costs us nothing to use. There is no machine of ours in the middle, so there is no monthly cost to pass on, and charging you monthly would be charging you for a thing that does not exist.

The trade is real and worth stating plainly: because we hold nothing, we cannot restore your stash for you, and we cannot see what went wrong when something goes wrong. What we get in exchange is that your milk log is not an entry in anyone's database, and the app does not need your money next month to keep working.

What local-first means when you open the app

In practice it means the app has no loading state. You open it on a plane, in a hospital basement, in a kitchen with bad signal, and the answer is already there: how much you have, which bag to use first, how long each one has left. There is no request to fail.

It also means the dates are yours to check. Milkloft does not invent storage times: it applies the guideline you select, and every estimate links back to the row that produced it, so you can read the same table we did in the breast milk storage chart or run a date through the expiration calculator without the app. If you follow a different guideline than the default, you change it in settings, and the whole stash recalculates.

One purchase, up to six people, the next baby too

Milkloft Pro is a one-time purchase with Family Sharing switched on, so one purchase unlocks Pro for up to six people in the same Apple family. The partner who gives the night bottle does not buy a second copy.

It also does not expire when this stretch of feeding does. Pro unlocks chapters, so you can close one baby's chapter and start the next one inside the same app, with the totals of the first kept. An app you own is still yours in two years. A subscription you cancelled is not.

Why the free tier is not a countdown

Free is not a trial. It holds twenty active bags and five places to keep them, and everything that is simply your own records staying in your hands: logging, inventory, the use-first order, estimated expirations from cited guidelines, expiration alerts, donation tracking, QR labels, CSV export, a full JSON backup and restore, private iCloud sync, and the Return to Work Planner's setup and its verdict on whether you are covered.

Pro is the work on top of those records: the plan itself and its simulations, your first week back, the outing planner, advanced statistics and forecasts, waste analytics, chapters and Family Sharing. The line is drawn so that a mother can use the app a lot, and enjoy it, without meeting a wall. If you never cross it, that is a fine outcome for both of us.

What one purchase does not promise

• It is not a backup service. Milkloft holds nothing for you. iCloud sync is Apple's, subject to your account and your storage, and the JSON export is the copy that is genuinely yours. Export it now and then, the way you would photos.
• It is not a shared account. Family Sharing shares the purchase, not the stash: there is no server to hold a shared inventory, so two phones each keep their own.
• It is not medical advice. Every date the app shows is an estimate from a published guideline, and the app says so on every surface that carries one.
• It is iPhone only, with no Android version and no web app, because the whole design leans on what the phone and your iCloud can do alone.

Your records outlive the app

The clearest test of who owns the data is whether you can walk away with it. On the free tier, Milkloft exports a full JSON backup of every bag, session, place and setting, plus a CSV you can open in any spreadsheet. No feature is held back to make leaving harder.

The same openness is why the sources are on screen rather than buried in a help page: the app shows you the guideline it applied and links to it, so what you learn here keeps working even on the days you do not open the app.

That is the whole argument. The app is bought once because it costs nothing to run, it asks for no account because it has nowhere to put one, and it hands your records back whenever you ask because they were never anywhere else. What is left for us to earn is the part you can see: that opening it on a bad night is the fastest way to know which bag to thaw, and that the number it gives you before you go back to work comes with its arithmetic and its sources open, so you can check it instead of taking our word for it.