> Also you could propose a discount for the first year

Sounds like a good idea, I haven't really seen this myself though, could you point me to some examples?

Specifically, for a note-taking app, a subscription model is discouraging. I don't want access to the history of my thoughts tied to a recurring payment. On the other hand, if I stopped paying for IntelliJ, I can open my code with any variety of free or paid IDEs (ignoring the fact that I can use a 12-month old version of IntelliJ indefinitely).