Vs subscriptions
Hive Log vs the monthly bill
On Hive Log:
The homestead log aisle is stacked with subscriptions: Farmbrite at $290 a year, or $29 a month, and Tend at $30 a month. The Hive Log 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: Farmbrite ($290 a year, or $29 a month: farm records, capped by animal count), Livestocked (herd tracking), Tend ($30 a month: crop planning for small farms). An average homestead stack lands at $24 to $30 a month, forever.
Run that out five years and Farmbrite costs $1450, Farmbrite costs $1450. A Swiss Knife, with the Hive Log folded in beside up to eleven other tools, is $95, once.
One year of Farmbrite at $290 costs more than a Swiss Knife at $95. Every year after that is pure savings on this category.
What the Hive Log replaces cleanly
Bees keep meticulous records; beekeepers, historically, keep damp notebooks in the shed. That is the working shape most subscriptions in this category are wrapped around; the Hive Log delivers it without the wrapper.
Concretely: Farmbrite would keep hive / colony, inspected, queen sighted, and temperament on its own servers, behind its own login, on its own pricing schedule. The Hive Log 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. Farmbrite does those things and does them properly; if any of them are load-bearing for how you work today, keep paying Farmbrite — the Hive Log is not trying to compete on those fronts.
Most people, honestly, were paying for features they did not use. The Hive Log is what remains when you strip that back to the tool.
What you stop renting
- Farmbrite: $290 a year, or $29 a monthFarm records, capped by animal count. $290 a year, every year.
- Tend: $30 a monthCrop planning for small farms.
Questions people ask
How does the cost compare to Farmbrite?
Farmbrite runs about $1450 over five years and Farmbrite about $1450. One year of Farmbrite at $290 costs more than a Swiss Knife at $95. A Swiss Knife folds the Hive Log in with up to eleven other tools for $95, once, and there is no year two.
Is the Hive Log a like-for-like replacement for Farmbrite?
For the working core — hive / colony, inspected, queen sighted, and temperament — yes. For farm records, capped by animal count, 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 Hive Log 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 Hive Log is deliberately hand-entered. Two minutes of typing on Monday keeps you closer to your own homestead log than an integration ever will.
The subscription was renting the arithmetic. Buy the arithmetic instead.