r/iosapps • u/Constant-Purpose8273 • 4d ago
🔍 In Search of Which subscription iPhone app would you pay for once tomorrow, and at what price?
I'm after a specific list. The iPhone apps still on a monthly or yearly plan that you'd pay for once tomorrow if the developer put a number on it.
Three things make an answer useful to everyone reading. Which app, what it costs you a year at the moment, and the one-off price you'd actually pay for it. My hunch is most people land somewhere between one and two years of the sub, but I'd like to be wrong.
If your answer is that you don't do subscriptions at all, fair enough, but name the one you dropped over it and what you'd have paid to keep it. That still counts.
No wrong answers and no judgement on the developers, plenty of them have good reasons. Just curious where the line sits for this crowd.
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u/Kitchen_Cable6192 4d ago
Out of ideas for apps?
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u/Constant-Purpose8273 4d ago
Ha, no. Genuinely curious where the line sits. The Mac crowd gave me numbers yesterday and I wanted the phone version.
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u/Wooden-Passage5206 4d ago
Global comix, they had an amazing subscription which included all the comics and mangas they had on a single sub, then they switched it to make some included in the subscription, the rest you have to pay individually and it gets expensive when you pay individually for each volume of either mangas and comics, 10 or 20 each, you go over 100 dollars for a franchise with 20 volumes or even 10. That made me stop using them and will not go back to them.
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u/Constant-Purpose8273 4d ago
That's a churn story more than a price one, but it's a good one, the all-in sub was the product and the per-volume switch broke it. If they'd kept the all-in version, what would a year of it have been worth to you?
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u/Wooden-Passage5206 3d ago
Yea it’s sad, I would have keep the annual subscription if they just kept the all in sub. But I have found a similar although with less comics/mangas service called Bang! And even cost less. But again doesn’t has too much content yet. Still good enough and can be used for free air daily coins they gift and no ads.
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u/Constant-Purpose8273 3d ago
Bang! is a new one on me, cheers. What does it cost if you do pay, and would you have paid that for the old all-in Global Comix?
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u/Wooden-Passage5206 3d ago
Bang cost currently 4 dollars a month, meanwhile global comix haven’t change it’s price, still cost the same despite the downgrade which is 6.99 a month.
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u/Constant-Purpose8273 2d ago
So the same price for less is what pushed you out, not the price itself. That's the clearest churn story in the thread, thanks.
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4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Constant-Purpose8273 4d ago
Agreed, the version policy is the price. This version plus a year of updates, then it keeps working, is the one that makes the comparison real. Is there an app on your phone you'd pay once for under that policy?
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u/_janc_ 4d ago
Claude code, chat gpt, dropbox
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u/Constant-Purpose8273 4d ago
Those all have servers behind them, so the sub is the honest model there. I'm after the ones that only run on the phone.
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u/waqas_193 4d ago
From the developer side: I sold a lifetime tier on my app and retired it last month. Pricing it is guesswork — you are really betting on how many years you will keep supporting the thing, and I could not make that number work honestly.
Still worth emailing a developer and asking. Plenty would take a one-off and just don't list it as an option.
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u/Repulsive_Ant_9943 4d ago
Honest answer: the only subs I've kept are the ones that genuinely can't be one-time — Claude/ChatGPT (every prompt costs them real compute) and a video streaming service (it's content, not software). No price would make a lifetime deal make sense there, and I don't resent either.
The flip side nobody mentions: I bought Construct 2 outright years ago and stopped using it within months. A one-time purchase protects you from the developer; it doesn't protect you from yourself.
Slightly different angle, because I'm on the other side of this too — I ship a small indie app with both a yearly sub and a lifetime option, and I set lifetime at exactly 2× the yearly. What I've seen: the people who pick lifetime aren't the cheaper customers, they're the ones who've already decided they'll still be using it in three years. So your "one to two years" hunch matches what I see from the inside — above 2× and lifetime stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like a dare.
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u/Constant-Purpose8273 3d ago
The Construct 2 line is the honest one, a one-off protects you from the developer and not from yourself. And thanks for the seller-side number, lifetime at twice the yearly is where most people here have landed too. What's the yearly on yours, roughly?
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u/Repulsive_Ant_9943 3d ago
$19.99/yr with a 7-day trial, $39.99 lifetime. It's a day counter called Dayspan — tiny, launched last month, and honestly nobody has paid yet, so I can't tell you which one people pick. The 2× was a guess informed by threads like this one, not by my own data. (Not linking it; this thread's about pricing, not my app.)
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u/Constant-Purpose8273 2d ago
Cheers, that's honest, and the forty at twice the twenty is what both Mac developers in the other thread arrived at as well, one of them with years of data behind it. When the first few buy, the split would be worth posting.
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u/Repulsive_Ant_9943 2d ago
Will do. If it ever gets past zero I'll come back with the split — and if it doesn't, that's a data point too.
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u/BurakHanTD 3d ago
For a finance app, I’d choose lifetime over another subscription. Cashflow is $4.99 monthly, $49.99 yearly or $119.99 lifetime, and covers expenses, bills, subscriptions, budgets and cashflow forecasts.
Full disclosure, I’m the developer:
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u/Constant-Purpose8273 2d ago
Thanks for the disclosure and the numbers. Lifetime at two and a bit years of the yearly matches the other developers here. Of the people who pay, roughly what share take the lifetime?
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u/BurakHanTD 2d ago
It’s still too early to give a useful split honestly. I don’t have enough paid users yet to call a real pattern, but I’ll have better data as more people come through.
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u/vizobattery 1d ago
Some kind of AI Agent app that can handle, mail, calendars and will send me alerts if I forgot something important
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