Most software pricing pages describe what you get for money. This one is about the opposite: the things PlanAstro has decided, on principle, never to charge for — regardless of how the rest of the pricing evolves. These are not vague intentions; they come straight from the project's own direction document, and we are publishing them so they can be held against us later.
Never a paid feature: plan correctness and equipment protection
A horizon mask. A minimum altitude. Lunar separation. Mount-safety restrictions. Basic offline use. None of these will ever sit behind a paywall, in the app or on the web. The reasoning is simple and, we think, correct: locking any of these would only produce frustration, not revenue. A feature that keeps a telescope from crashing into its mount, or that keeps the app usable when you have no signal at the edge of a field, is not a premium convenience — it is table stakes for a tool astrophotographers can actually trust in the field.
Sky imagery is never sold
This one goes further, and it is worth quoting directly, because it is a personal line as much as a product one: "selling something that isn't mine, even under cover of server storage, doesn't sit right with me." Every offline sky-imagery tier the app offers — Essential, Comfort, and High quality — is free. The tier you pick is a storage preference: how much of the sky you want cached on your own device, not a purchase decision. This holds even for a possible future hosted-portal mirror of that imagery. The underlying data does not belong to us, and we are not going to charge for access to it.
What is a paid candidate, named plainly
Being explicit about what we will never sell only means something if we are equally explicit about what might eventually cost money. The named candidates are: advanced mosaics and framing, multi-night planning, a detailed light-pollution map with forecasts, and — as a future proof-of-concept, not a commitment — a plate-solving companion app. Multi-device synchronization, and the version history it depends on, belongs to the hosted-service subscriptions described on the Offers page; it is deliberately not something the app itself can unlock, because it is an ongoing service (hosting, backups, storage) rather than a one-time feature. A self-hosted portal keeps everything, synchronization included, with no subscription at all.
Why bother writing this down
Because a promise that only lives in a pricing page can quietly change the next time that page is rewritten. A promise written into the project's own internal direction document, and then republished here in public, is something we can be asked to justify if we ever drift from it. If a future version of PlanAstro ever puts a horizon mask, offline use, or sky imagery behind a paywall, this article is the receipt to hold up against it.