Vs subscriptions
Family Tree vs the monthly bill
On Family Tree:
The relationship log aisle is stacked with subscriptions: folk at $288 a year, or $30 a month, and Mesh (formerly Clay) at $120 a year, or $20 a month. The Family Tree is one HTML file that does the honest working core of what those tools sell, once, for the price of a Swiss Knife.
The bill you were quietly paying
Name the actual products and the arithmetic stops being abstract: folk ($288 a year, or $30 a month: personal CRM, per seat), Mesh (formerly Clay) ($120 a year, or $20 a month: relationship memory in the cloud), Dex ($86.40 a year, or $12 a month: birthday and follow-up reminders). An average relationships stack lands at $7 to $24 a month, forever.
Run that out five years and Dex costs $432, folk costs $1440. A Swiss Knife, with the Family Tree folded in beside up to eleven other tools, is $95, once.
14 months of Dex at $86.40 a year come to the price of a Swiss Knife at $95. Every year after that is pure savings on this category.
What the Family Tree replaces cleanly
Somebody in every family is the one who remembers — which great-aunt married which farmer, who emigrated and why. That is the working shape most subscriptions in this category are wrapped around; the Family Tree delivers it without the wrapper.
Concretely: folk would keep name, relation, born, and stories & notes on its own servers, behind its own login, on its own pricing schedule. The Family Tree keeps the same fields in a file on your disk — same shape of work, no monthly line on the card.
You keep the workflow. You lose the login, the sync outage, the price hike email, and the export deadline.
What you honestly give up
Team collaboration in real time. Auto-import from third-party APIs. A mobile app that pings you. folk does those things and does them properly; if any of them are load-bearing for how you work today, keep paying folk — the Family Tree is not trying to compete on those fronts.
Most people, honestly, were paying for features they did not use. The Family Tree is what remains when you strip that back to the tool.
What you stop renting
- folk: $288 a year, or $30 a monthPersonal CRM, per seat. $288 a year, every year.
- Mesh (formerly Clay): $120 a year, or $20 a monthRelationship memory in the cloud. $120 a year, every year.
- Dex: $86.40 a year, or $12 a monthBirthday and follow-up reminders. $86.40 a year, every year.
Questions people ask
How does the cost compare to folk?
Dex runs about $432 over five years and folk about $1440. 14 months of Dex at $86.40 a year come to the price of a Swiss Knife at $95. A Swiss Knife folds the Family Tree in with up to eleven other tools for $95, once, and there is no year two.
Is the Family Tree a like-for-like replacement for folk?
For the working core — name, relation, born, and stories & notes — yes. For personal CRM, per seat, no. We would rather say that plainly than sell you a switch you'll regret in a fortnight.
What if my needs grow past a single file?
Excellent problem. Keep the Family Tree for what it does well; add a specialised SaaS on top only when you have a specialised need. Nothing here locks you in — it is a file.
Can I import my current data?
The Family Tree is deliberately hand-entered. Two minutes of typing on Monday keeps you closer to your own relationship log than an integration ever will.
The subscription was renting the arithmetic. Buy the arithmetic instead.