Pricing your indie iOS subscription: what we've learned
Pricing an iOS subscription is about more than the number. It's monthly vs yearly, trial length, weekly bait, and per-country localization - and they all interact. Here's the playbook we converge on.
The weekly/yearly trap
Many indie apps in 2024-2025 adopted aggressive weekly subscriptions ($4.99-9.99/week) with 3-day trials. Apple has been clamping down on misleading framings - and reviews and refund rates were brutal.
We've never used a weekly subscription, and never will. It maximizes short-term revenue at the cost of brand trust. App Review is also more skeptical of weekly pricing on apps that don't justify high engagement.
Yearly vs monthly
Our default: a single yearly plan with a free trial. Adding monthly typically reduces total revenue, because monthly subscribers churn fast and the yearly users would have converted anyway.
Exception: apps where the use case is clearly seasonal or short-term (a tax filing app, a vacation tracker). Monthly makes sense there.
Trial length: 3, 7, or 14 days
We've tested all three. Longer trials don't necessarily improve trial-to-paid conversion - they actually slightly hurt it by giving users more time to forget they signed up.
Our default is 7 days. Three days is too short to really evaluate (and triggers refund anger when the user forgets). Fourteen is past the point of momentum. Seven hits the sweet spot for most app categories we ship in.
Localized pricing
App Store Connect lets you set prices per country. Don't accept Apple's 'Tier 50' default conversions blindly - they're often 30-50% over local market parity.
We use Apple's automatic conversion only as a starting point, then manually adjust ~12 'priority' countries to match local cost-of-living and competitive pricing. India, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and Indonesia in particular need significant adjustments.
The price/perceived-value matrix
Two simple questions to ask before setting your price:
- Is the user buying a tool (one-time job) or a habit (ongoing relationship)?
- Is the value obvious in the first 60 seconds, or does it compound over weeks?
Tools with obvious value: lifetime unlock, $9-19. Habits with compounding value: yearly subscription with trial, $19-39. Tools with delayed value: avoid subscriptions; commit to lifetime.
What ~$30/year converts to elsewhere
A $29.99 yearly subscription in the US becomes roughly: €27 in EU, £23 in UK, ₺249 in Turkey, ₹1,199 in India, R$129 in Brazil. Compare these against local benchmarks (Spotify, Netflix, comparable apps in the same category) to sanity-check.
Over 18 months we've seen a 2-3x revenue lift from properly localized pricing in tier-2 countries. It's the single highest-ROI pricing change you can make.