Yeah I'm not very interested in a subscription service but I'd happily pay a larger fee upfront to remove ads forever with no extra features. I can handle settings backup/sync myself.
I love LJ's work and will happily remove ads from Sync when possible (even though my adblocker hides them anyway). I'm not very fond of buying Ultra, as I hate paying for something I won't use. Ironically I would rather make a recurring donation via Liberapay and get nothing out of it than pay for some functionality and feel uneasy about never using it, lol. I already support my home instance on Liberapay
This is the only part of ultra that actually bothers me. I grabbed it primarily to support the development. And I'd be much more happy about it if 100% went to the creator. But app stores remove any apps that tell you how to pay a different way. So there could be a way and the app simply isn't allowed to tell us.
I immediately subscribed to ultra. The reason is I think there is not enough active Lemmy users to sustain app developments with just one time purchase right now. I used sync for reddit a lot in the past (bought pro and dev versions, but not subscription version), but for the Lemmy version, I think it would be hard for the dev to continue working on the Lemmy version indefinitely (I think the dev is working on this full time?) without some sort of recurring income. I don't want this app to die an early death so I'll do what I can to support it, including paying for the relatively small $17/year subscription.