shadow-planner 2.0: pay once, plan forever
Version 2.0 replaces the monthly subscription with a single €4,99 purchase, converts every existing subscriber to a lifetime license for free, and sharpens the Gantt chart.
Today we shipped shadow-planner 2.0. The headline is simple: there is no subscription any more. The app stays free to install and use, and if you outgrow the starter limits you pay €4,99 once — not per month, not per year, once.
Why we dropped the subscription
shadow-planner is a desktop app. Your plans live in a SQLite file on your own disk. There is no server we run for you, no sync service, no hosted AI. A recurring charge for software that costs us nothing to keep running for you never felt honest — and it was the most common piece of feedback we got from Store reviews and emails.
So 2.0 makes the pricing match the product:
- Free tier, unchanged: 1 scenario, 3 projects, 3 employees. Every feature — Gantt, utilisation, portfolio, AI chat, planning agent, snapshots, export — is fully available.
- Lifetime license, €4,99: removes the limits permanently. It never expires and the app never phones home to re-check it.
- Existing subscribers: you are converted to a lifetime license automatically the next time the app updates. You don't need to do anything, and you won't be charged again.
Checkout still runs through Stripe, so the app never sees your card details.
Gantt chart refinements
Alongside the pricing change, 2.0 tightens up the timeline view:
- Milestones show their date right in the label —
Go-live (2026-08-21)— so you don't have to hover. - Dates update live while dragging a bar, including the workdays breakdown.
- Dependency picker context: when you pick a predecessor from another project, the picker shows which project it belongs to.
- Better label contrast on coloured bars in both themes.
What's next
The planning agent and the chat assistant are where most of the upcoming work goes — better plans from shorter briefs, and more of the controlling workflow (re-baselining, what-if comparisons) available as a single chat instruction. The full list of changes, including the small stuff, is on the changelog.
If you've been waiting for a one-time price before upgrading: now's the time. Install shadow-planner for free and upgrade from inside the app whenever you hit a limit.