Home Design Software With No Subscription — What's Actually Left in 2026

Updated August 6, 2026 · Based on hands-on testing

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If you’ve been searching for home design software without a subscription and coming up empty, you’re not imagining it. The category moved, and the product most people were looking for moved with it.

What changed

Chief Architect’s Home Designer is subscription-only. Its site now offers one tier, billed at $495/yr or $79/month, with the line “Subscribe to the software by the month or year.” The professional product, Chief Architect Premier, is $1,995/yr or $229/month. There is no perpetual licence on either page.

The only sign the old model ever existed is an upgrade offer — half off the first year — addressed to “legacy license holders.” That phrasing is the whole story: buying once is now something you used to be able to do.

This matters because Google still suggests “chief architect one time purchase” when you start typing. People are searching for a thing that no longer exists, landing on a pricing page, and leaving confused.

What’s actually still buy-once

Two products in the consumer price range, and they are not equivalent.

Live Home 3D — $49.99 Standard, $99.99 Pro, on both Mac and Windows, and its store page calls it a Lifetime License in as many words. There’s a free version to try first: two storeys maximum, 720p exports, watermarked, and a reduced 2,400-object library. Pro lifts the storey cap, adds offline ray-tracing, and pushes video export to 4K.

Plan7Architect — Basic $79.99, Expert $89.99, Pro 5 $99.99, with its own page stating it “offers a one-time purchase without recurring subscription fees.” We’re listing it because the pricing model is clearly stated and it claims DWG export, which matters below. Be aware that everything known about it here comes from the vendor’s own marketing, with no independent testing behind it.

The math is not close

Live Home 3D Pro costs $99.99 once. Home Designer costs $79/month.

You pass the buy-once price somewhere in month two.

That comparison is real, but it isn’t free of catches. A perpetual licence buys you this version. When the next major release arrives you either pay an upgrade price or stay put, and “stay put” eventually means an OS update breaks something. A subscription is worse value and better insurance. Which one wins depends entirely on whether you’re designing one house this year or working in this software every week.

The catch nobody mentions: DWG

Here’s the thing that decides this for a lot of people, and it isn’t price.

Live Home 3D does not read DWG or DXF. Its supported formats are Collada, OBJ, SKP and similar 3D interchange formats. If a builder, architect, or your local planning office sends you a DWG plan, the cheapest buy-once option in this article cannot open it.

Plan7Architect states it exports DWG — worth checking against your actual file before you commit, since that claim is the vendor’s own.

And if you genuinely need to work with DWG plans, the honest answer may be that you give up on buying once. Homestyler opens DWG, lets you type wall measurements in directly, and began life as an Autodesk product — but it’s a subscription, from $6.80/mo on Pro+, with a free plan that watermarks output at 1K. The free plan costs nothing to test whether it reads your file, which is a cheaper experiment than a $99 purchase that turns out not to.

The iOS trap

If you’re buying on iPad, read the button carefully. Live Home 3D’s iOS editions are sold both ways: $49.99 one-time for Standard, or $5.99/month or $19.99/year as a subscription — and the same split on Pro at $99.99 versus $14.99/month.

Mac and Windows are one-time only. iOS is where you can accidentally subscribe to the software you picked because it wasn’t a subscription.

So which one?

• You want to stop paying monthly, and DWG isn’t in your life → Live Home 3D, $49.99 or $99.99 once. Try the free version first; it’s limited, but it tells you whether the interface suits you.
• You need DWG and want to buy once → Plan7Architect claims DWG export at $79.99-$99.99. Verify it against a real file before you pay.
• You need DWG and would rather not gamble → Homestyler’s free plan opens DWG at zero cost. If it works, $6.80/mo is less than a year of most alternatives.
• You’re producing construction documents → none of the above. That’s the tier Chief Architect Premier’s $1,995/yr exists for.

One thing worth being clear about: this article compares pricing models and stated capabilities, not output quality. We haven’t run these one-time-purchase products hands-on, and we’re not going to rank their renders until we have.

For the wider comparison of AI-assisted interior tools — including where a human designer beats all of them — see our best AI tools for interior design guide. If what you actually want is to restyle a room you already have rather than design one, AI room design from a photo is the cheaper starting point.