Blog · App Store & Play
Lifetime or Subscription: Pricing a Small iOS App on StoreKit
CodeLoop Studio ·
RoomFit sells two paid options: €24.99 a year, or €59.99 once. Offering both is not indecision. It is a bet about how long somebody keeps an app they open while standing in a furniture shop.
Subscriptions assume a habit
A yearly plan is honest when the product is used continuously — a tool for work, a service with running costs on every account. Interior planning is bursty: you furnish a flat, you go quiet for eight months, you buy a rug.
For that shape, a yearly-only paywall converts the person mid-move and annoys them at renewal. Lifetime captures the buyer who knows they are in one intense project and does not want a recurring line on their card.
Lifetime cannot include unlimited running costs
This is the trap. If lifetime promises unlimited AI, a single enthusiastic user can spend more than €59.99 in a month and you have sold them a permanent liability.
So the split is: lifetime unlocks everything structural — unlimited saved spaces, Compare Products, 100 AR visuals a day — and the model-backed feature stays a credit balance of 100 Style Checks, with packs available when someone needs more. Yearly gets a monthly refill because the subscription keeps paying for it.
What StoreKit forces you to get right
Three product kinds, one entitlement check. An auto-renewing subscription, a non-consumable lifetime unlock, and consumable credit packs all resolve into “what is this user allowed to do right now.”
Restore has to work. New phone, same Apple ID, purchase back. Reviewers test it and users assume it.
Prices vary by region. Hard-coded euro strings in the UI will be wrong somewhere; read the localised price from the store.
The paywall states the limits. Daily AR allowances, credit counts, and the fact that unused daily allowance does not roll over — before payment, not in a support reply.
Release mechanics around all this are the ordinary part of shipping to the App Store, and in-app update prompts have their own notes for the Android side.
Pricing your own app
Model the tier a heavy user can push to a loss before you publish it. We do this as part of custom mobile app development, and budget ranges live in app development cost. See the whole product in the RoomFit case study, or send scope via the online estimate.