ONCE Model

A pay-once, self-hosted, source-available way of selling software — 37signals’ deliberate alternative to SaaS. You buy the product once, download it, install it on your own server, and run it yourself. No subscription, no recurring fees. Named after the product line ONCE (once.com), launched by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson in late 2023, first product a relaunched Campfire.

The bet

Pendulums swing. After a decade in which renting software was effectively the only option, Fried bets on subscription fatigue: you keep paying the same monthly amount for largely the same product you had four years ago — unlike a magazine, no genuinely new issue arrives each month. ONCE offers ownership instead of rental: ‘people should be able to buy what they need versus rent what they need.‘

How a ONCE product is chosen and built

1. Find a commodity charging luxury prices. Look for categories with dozens of near-identical alternatives that still charge tens to thousands of dollars a month with no real price differentiation. In every other industry there is a generic; in business software there often is not.
2. Build a high-quality 80/20 version. Two people, roughly three months. Don’t do everything the incumbents do — get the core right at a very high standard, tight and simple.
3. Price it as a no-brainer. Under $1,000, paid once. Cheap enough that buying it is obvious even as an insurance policy or a backup, not only as a replacement.

Because 37signals does not host it, the marginal cost is essentially zero — no ongoing hosting or support infrastructure, which is the expensive part of SaaS.

Distinctive features

• You get the source code. Modifiable and inspectable (not resellable) — effectively a worked example of how to build the thing well in HTML, CSS, and Ruby on Rails.
• Additive, not only replacing. A ONCE product can sit alongside the incumbent — a backup chat for when Slack is down, or an air-gapped tool for an executive team or a secure facility that cannot use cloud SaaS at all.
• Versioning like old software. Buy 1.0, get all 1.x updates free and choose whether to install them; a future 2.0 may be a discounted paid upgrade.
• As few words as possible. The first product aims for ~30 words of interface so it is near-universal, with translations shown in a panel rather than localised packs.

Why it matters

The ONCE model is the operating expression of 37signals’ wider stance: high margins, two-person teams, no marginal cost, and the freedom (from appetites and independence) to make a bet whose outcome is unknown. It reframes the SaaS default as a choice rather than a law, and targets the same Fortune-5-million market 37signals serves elsewhere — self-service, no sales team.

Source

See Jason Fried on 37signals, Bootstrapping, and the Shape Up Methodology. Related: Shape Up, Outcomes-Based Pricing.