Frankly, DnDBeyond is quite different in its offering from HLO. First of all, the basics are free, or rather financed by ads. When you buy packages you still can combine these with the "free" account as long as you don't need more than 6 characters or homebrew content from other users.
Then there is the "Master" tier that allows a GM to share his bought content with all his players in a group. This is one of the questions concerning HLO that I posted earlier, can content packages be shared with others in your gaming group in return for the subscription price?
And even then there still are users who absolutely prefer to get an offline application. Here is a quote from DnDBeyond's own FAQ:
Quote:
Q: Not having an Android Native app is the only thing holding me back from getting the legendary bundle and master tier subscription.
A: We are certainly working on getting an app ready for our users. Make sure to check the forums on the website for the most up to date information on the app. I promise it is coming! 
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Someone here suggested that HLO could be offered as a self-hosting server package. That would eliminate all of the ongoing costs while users can run the server on their own hardware, probably even running server and client (browser) on the same machine.