One payment, never a subscription

Everything you need. Nothing built for somebody else.

You did not buy a mount, a filter wheel and a calibration library. You bought a sealed box that finds things by itself. Most of what this hobby charges for is built for the other person, and you end up paying for it anyway.

The floorSeven things you actually need

What you need	Us	Assembled elsewhere
What do I point it at tonight Filtered for my scope's field of view and my sky, not a list of everything up.	covered First-night planner, per device, with what each target will actually look like.	partly Planning sites list what is up and let you filter. None of them know which of five smart scopes you own, and their interfaces assume you can read an altitude graph.
Is tonight worth setting up A yes or no, not a cloud percentage I have to interpret.	covered One sentence, plus a ceiling score for what the night can actually give you.	partly Weather apps give excellent forecasts and leave the judgement to you. The paid tier mostly buys more layers, not more of an answer.
When is my next good night for a particular object Moonless, high enough, clear, from my garden, in the next fortnight.	covered Fourteen nights ranked by what a flawless session could score.	nothing does this Nothing does this. Planning tools answer per night; weather tools answer per hour. Neither answers per object, per place, per fortnight.
Is the image I got any good, and what went wrong In words I understand, against what was achievable that night.	covered Eleven measurements, plain English, graded against the sky you had.	partly The professional suite has frame analysis, aimed at culling subframes, priced at a few hundred, and expressed in eccentricity and FWHM. Free scripts exist for the same job and the same audience.
Fix the gradient, the colour cast and the stretch Without a fortnight of tutorials first.	covered Corrected version handed back automatically, plus palettes where they are real.	partly The free processing tools are genuinely excellent and genuinely hard. The paid ones are more capable and no easier.
Keep my images and see whether I am improving With the conditions attached, or the comparison means nothing.	covered Every session stamped automatically, and an execution score with conditions removed.	partly Image hosting stores the picture beautifully. It does not know what the sky was doing, so it cannot tell you whether you improved or the weather did.
Learn what to do next About my telescope, not about astrophotography in general.	covered A seven-stage path, and advice attached to your own frames.	nothing does this Courses and forums are general. None of them know that dithering ships off by default on your particular scope.

The billWhat the paid tiers cost, every year

Read off the sellers' own pages in August 2026. We do not name them: anyone in this hobby knows exactly which services these are, and naming them would turn a comparison into an attack and age the moment somebody changes a plan.

Tier	Monthly	Yearly	Why people end up paying it
Image hosting, mid tier	$6.22/mo	$56/yr	The free tier stops accepting uploads after thirty days and shows adverts, so this is the first thing almost everybody ends up paying for.
Astronomy weather, pro tier	$2.99/mo	$30/yr	The free version is good. The paid one adds the layers people upgrade for once they start driving somewhere to observe.
Processing suite, subscription optional	$5.00/mo	$60/yr	Optional, and many people use the free tools instead. Included because a large share of beginners do buy one within the first year.
The realistic minimum	—	$86/yr, forever	Hosting and weather. Every year, for as long as you stay in the hobby.

The honest arithmetic

We are not cheaper on day one. $99 is more than $86. We are cheaper from month 14 onward, and every month after that forever.

Year 1$86

Year 3$258

Year 5$430

Us, ever$99

Five years of the minimum stack is $430. With a processing subscription it is $730.

What one payment covers

A first-night plan for your exact scope
Unlimited analysis, with the sky it was shot under
Corrections and palettes at full resolution
Target windows fourteen nights ahead
Alerts, offline kits, and the stamped log
No adverts, no upload limit, no renewal
Every feature we add later

$99 once. Not a subscription.

Become a founding member

The real reasonWhat you are paying for and will never use

This is the actual answer to why the bill is what it is, and it is not that those tools are bad. They are excellent. They are built for somebody with a mount, a filter wheel and a peer group to impress, and you are being sold their tier.

Unlimited image revisions and tens of gigabytes of storage

You will upload a stacked JPEG per session. The storage tiers are sized for people keeping every calibration frame of a twenty-hour project.

Equipment databases, image-of-the-day competitions and peer critique forums

These are excellent and they are for people ready to be judged against the best in the world. Being graded against an image-of-the-day winner in your first month is how beginners conclude they are bad at this.

Two hundred scientific processing routines, deconvolution and spectroscopy

Built for people with a mount, a filter wheel and calibration libraries. You have a sealed box that stacks as it goes.

Mosaic planners and telescope control integration

For rigs where you drive the mount yourself. Your scope does this internally and does not accept external control.

Satellite, smoke and multi-site forecast layers

For people choosing between three remote sites two hours apart. You are choosing whether to go into the garden.

The part we are not going to pretend about

You can assemble a lot of this for nothing. There are free planning tools, a free weather forecast, and free processing software that is genuinely world class. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

What free gets you is six accounts that do not know each other, do not know which of five telescopes you own, and have no idea what the sky was doing when you pressed go. Every one of them will give you a correct answer to a question you did not quite ask.

Why one payment and not $7 a month

When one of the big image hosts raised its prices in July 2026, the reaction was not really about that host. It was about the fifth subscription. We would rather be the thing you bought once and stopped thinking about than the sixth line on that list.

Prices reviewed August 2026 and rounded. They will drift. Where a service offers annual billing at a discount we have used the cheaper annual figure, which is the most favourable reading for them.