We already covered how we price a project — what a client pays us to build it. This is the other pricing question, the one that keeps mattering long after launch: what the app itself charges its users, and on what schedule. Across a portfolio that spans habit trackers, exam prep, and legal reference tools, we don't default to one model. We ask what kind of value the app actually keeps delivering.
The real question isn't "subscription or not" — it's "does the value renew"
A subscription is a bet that the app keeps being useful in month three the same way it was in week one. That's true for something like WaterTracker or Gym Tracker & Workout Planner — hydration and training data only stay useful if you keep logging, and the app's job (reminders, history, trend tracking) doesn't have a natural finish line. It's a much weaker fit for something like Rutiera: Legi & Amenzi, where a driver mostly needs to look up a specific traffic law once and move on. Charging that user every month for a lookup they do a handful of times a year is optimizing for revenue over the actual usage pattern — and users notice, in reviews and in churn, faster than any internal metric will show it.
Exam prep is its own category, and it's genuinely time-bound
The Civio citizenship-test apps and BacIstorie are structurally different from both of the above: usage is intense but has a real end date — the exam itself. A subscription still makes sense here, but for a different reason than the habit-tracker case: it funds continued content updates (question banks that track official sources, which do change) rather than assuming indefinite daily engagement. That's why these apps pair a monthly option with a lifetime/annual alternative — someone six weeks from their exam has a very different willingness to commit than someone who just downloaded the app to see what it's like.
Where one-time purchase is honestly the better answer
Utilities that solve one bounded problem — TicTacToe: X & O Board Game, Foaie Parcurs for fleet trip logs — don't gain anything from recurring billing except user resentment. If the entire value is unlocked the moment you use the feature, forcing a subscription on top of it is a mismatch that shows up as one-star reviews about pricing, which quietly damages conversion on every future download that reads them. A fair one-time price captures the value just as well without the friction.
The subscription tax you pay in App Store Review
This is worth saying plainly: subscriptions add real engineering and review surface area — StoreKit's sandbox testing for purchase, restore, and cancellation, which we already flagged in our pre-submission checklist, plus Apple's requirements around clear terms and an easy cancellation path. That's not a reason to avoid subscriptions where they fit — it's a reason not to reach for one by default when a simpler model would serve the same app better and ship with less review risk.
If you're scoping a new app and pricing model feels like an afterthought to settle right before submission, that's usually a sign it hasn't been thought through — it changes what you build, not just what you charge for it.