No subscription: what a one-time price buys
Yes — Horologe is an app without a subscription, and it's $5.99, paid once. One payment, and the clock is yours.
The specification, in prose: four faces — Mantel, Station, Chronometer, Nocturne; five bells — Westminster, Whittington, Ship's Bell, Temple Bowl, Grandfather; quarters on or off and the hour counted out either way; quiet hours silent from 10pm to 8am; a right-click on the menu-bar bell to mute. About three and a half megabytes, macOS 15 or later, from the Mac App Store.
Why subscriptions exist
A subscription is usually honest arithmetic. If an app stores your work on a server, syncs between devices, runs a service, or checks a licence online, then it has a bill every month whether you open it or not. Charging monthly is how that bill gets paid. It's not a trick; it's rent.
Why this app has nothing to charge for
Horologe has no account, no sync, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no licence check and no update ping. It makes no network calls at all — it isn't that we choose not to send anything, it's that there's nothing in the app that could. It reads the clock your Mac already keeps. There is no server to run, so there is no rent to pass on.
That's also why it asks for nothing. No Accessibility, no Input Monitoring, no Screen Recording, no microphone. macOS will never show you a permission dialog on Horologe's behalf.
If the maker vanishes
The copy on your Mac keeps striking. There's no server to switch off, no account to lapse, no company that has to still exist for your clock to work at noon tomorrow. Put it on a machine that never touches the internet again and it'll still ring.
You pay through the Mac App Store, so Apple holds the transaction and the receipt. There's no card on file with us, because there's no us to hold it — just the one payment you already made.
What the limits still are
One-time doesn't mean perfect. No alarms, no timers, no world clocks, and no ticking. It can ring during a call, since it can't see your screen or your calendar — which is why muting is one right-click on the menu-bar bell. Those are the honest edges of the thing you're buying.
Horologe is $5.99 once. For the full price question, read what Horologe costs; for what a free clock already does, read why pay for a clock your Mac already has.