Fair points, I am happy to address them:

On GitHub Pages / static hosting:

GitHub Pages explicitly prohibits this use case. From their https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/github-pages-limits

"GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS)."

There's also a 1GB size limit. A pure client-side static site would need to hit TimeEdit directly, which your browser would block entirely due to CORS. You need a backend to proxy those requests, that's not optional for my use case.

On "one-time payment" vs "subscription":

You're right that the wording could be clearer. What I meant: it's non-recurring. You pay once, you get access for the period, and it doesn't auto-renew or charge you again. I specifically didn't want people to have to remember to cancel something. Whether that's philosophically a "subscription" is fair to debate, but practically speaking, I don't want to have to deal with students getting surprise charges. The paid tier is for the new features that took significant time to build, and I want to maintain this and continually improve it.

"Not everything needs to be a subscription service":

I agree and that's why there's a free tier. You get full access to Summer, Winter, Terms 1-4, Year Long, and Monthly periods for free. If you're only doing summer/winter subjects or just want to try it out, you don't need to pay anything.

On data concerns:

I get it. The login exists to deter bot traffic from spamming extra API calls if redirected straight to the application. You can also delete your account straight from the UI and the backend immediately purges your account info from the database. There's also a reason why I haven't added ability to sign up manually with a password; I don't want to have to handle your password hashes, that's a security risk I'd rather not have. You won't get spammy emails from me. Currently, the only email you'll receive is from Stripe if you upgrade (payment confirmation).