How to Price an iOS App: A Framework for Indie Developers
How to price an iOS app comes down to three decisions, in order: which monetisation model the category will actually support, what number to attach to it, and how to plan around the gap between what a customer pays and what Apple pays you. Most pricing advice skips straight to the third-order stuff — psychological price points, ending in 9, A/B tests — while getting the first decision wrong, which is the one that determines whether the app is a business at all.
This is the framework, in the order the decisions actually bind. It is the first post in the iOS Business pillar, and it assumes you are a solo developer or small team without a pricing analyst, deciding this once and living with it for a year.
The Short Answer
- Your list price is not your revenue. Apple's term for what you receive is proceeds — the customer price minus taxes and Apple's commission. Standard rate leaves you 70%; the Small Business Program and second-year subscriptions leave you 85%.
- Let the category choose the model. Estimated revenue divided by estimated downloads across the top apps for your keyword tells you what the audience already tolerates. Fighting that is expensive and usually futile.
- Price is a market question, not a cost question. Your marginal cost per install is effectively zero, so cost-plus pricing tells you nothing.
- Apple gives you 900 price points from $0.29 upward — the constraint is almost never the price grid.
- Subscription year two is worth 21% more per dollar than year one. Retention is a pricing lever, not just a product one.
Start With What Apple Actually Pays You
Every pricing conversation should begin here, because the number you choose and the number you receive are different, and the gap is large enough to change which model makes sense.
Apple separates the two explicitly. Sales is "the total amount billed to customers." Proceeds is "the Customer Price minus applicable taxes and Apple's commission." Apple states outright that "sales totals are not the same as your proceeds" (App Store Connect Help).
Here is the commission structure, stated the way Apple states it — as the share you keep:
| Situation | You receive | Implied commission |
|---|---|---|
| Standard rate | 70% | 30% |
| Subscription, before one year of paid service | 70% | 30% |
| Subscription, after one year of paid service | 85% | 15% |
| App Store Small Business Program | 85% | 15% |
The App Store Small Business Program is the single most important line here for most readers. It applies a 15% commission to developers who earned no more than 1 million USD in total proceeds during the previous calendar year and no more than 1 million USD in the current year — and to developers new to the App Store. If you are reading this to price your first or second app, 15% is your rate, not 30%. Enrolment is not automatic; you have to opt in.
Two details on the subscription clock that catch people out, from Apple's auto-renewable subscriptions documentation:
- Free trial periods do not count toward the year of paid service. Neither do renewal extensions. The clock starts when money starts.
- If a subscription lapses and the customer returns within 60 days, accrual resumes rather than resetting.
For a Small Business Program member the 85% rate applies to subscriptions from day one, so the year-one/year-two distinction mainly matters once you are above the threshold — which is a good problem.
What this means for pricing: set your price on the gross number the customer sees, then model your business on 70% or 85% of it, minus taxes. A developer who plans revenue on list price is overstating income by somewhere between 15% and 30% before tax.
Pricing Is a Market Question, Not a Cost Question
The instinct carried over from every other kind of business is to price from cost. That instinct is useless here. Your marginal cost of serving one more install is approximately zero, and your development cost is sunk the moment you ship. Cost-plus pricing on a zero marginal cost produces no answer.
What sets the ceiling is what the audience for your category has already been trained to pay. A decade of free competitors in a category is a hard constraint, not a marketing challenge you can out-copywrite. A category where users already pay $80 a year for a subscription is one where $80 a year is unremarkable.
So the useful question is not "what is this worth?" It is "what does this audience already pay, and for what?" That is an empirical question, and you can answer it before you write the paywall.
Let the Category Choose the Model
The highest-leverage pricing decision is the model, not the number. Get the model wrong and no price fixes it; get it right and a mediocre price still works.
The signal that tells you which model a category supports is the ratio of estimated revenue to estimated downloads across the top-ranking apps for your keyword. Both figures come from the same source in the same query, so most of the estimate bias cancels and the ratio holds up even when the absolute numbers do not — which is exactly why it is the right tool for this job. The reasoning behind that is in what App Store download estimates actually tell you, and it is worth reading before you lean on any of these numbers.
Illustrative arithmetic, using round numbers rather than any real app:
| What the top apps show | Revenue per download | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| 50,000 downloads, $5,000 revenue | ~$0.10 | Free-forever audience. Ads or scale, not subscriptions |
| 20,000 downloads, $60,000 revenue | ~$3 | Mixed. Freemium with a real conversion rate |
| 5,000 downloads, $50,000 revenue | ~$10 | Audience pays willingly. Subscription territory |
| 2,000 downloads, $60,000 revenue | ~$30 | High-value niche. Premium subscription or high-priced one-time |
Check the ratio across the top three to five apps, not just position one. A single well-monetised leader in an otherwise thin category usually means that app has a brand, not that the category pays. If four of five show $0.10 and one shows $10, the category is free and one company has an enterprise deal.
Then match the model to what you found:
| Model | Works when | Requires | Main risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free + ads | Very high volume, near-zero revenue per download | Real scale — tens of thousands of installs monthly | Indies rarely reach ad-viable volume |
| Paid up front | Category shows healthy revenue per download and a one-off use case | A product that demonstrates value before purchase | Removes your funnel; no trial, no upsell |
| Freemium + IAP | Mid revenue per download, clear feature ladder | A genuinely useful free tier and one obvious upgrade | Free tier too good, or too weak to convert |
| Subscription | High revenue per download, recurring value | Continuing value delivery — updates, content, sync | Churn; and year one is taxed at 30% |
The most common indie mistake is choosing subscription because subscription is what successful apps have, in a category whose revenue-per-download says $0.15. That is not a pricing problem. That is the wrong category, and the pre-launch competitive research checklist is where you catch it before the build.
Choosing the Number
Once the model is settled, the number matters less than developers expect — and the price grid is almost never the constraint.
Apple offers 900 price points. The change was announced on 6 December 2022 for auto-renewable subscriptions, described by Apple as "nearly 10 times the number of price points previously available for most apps," and extended to all apps and in-app purchase types on 9 March 2023. The range runs from $0.29 up to $10,000 by request, in increments of $0.10 up to $10 and $0.50 from $10 to $50.
Practical guidance within that:
- Anchor to the category, not to your costs. Your competitors have already run the experiment you are about to run. Price within the band the top apps occupy unless you have a specific reason to sit outside it.
- Price higher than feels comfortable when the category supports it. A subscription priced at half the category norm does not convert twice as well; it signals half the value and halves your revenue.
- Annual alongside monthly. Annual plans pull customers past the one-year mark where your share rises from 70% to 85%, and reduce churn exposure at the same time.
- Let Apple handle storefront pricing at first. Apple applies your chosen price across storefronts with its own regional adjustments. Hand-tuning per-country pricing is a late-stage optimisation, not a launch decision.
The Retention Lever Hiding in the Commission
Here is a consequence of the commission structure that rarely makes it into pricing discussions.
Going from 70% to 85% is not a 15% improvement. It is a 21.4% increase in what you receive per dollar ($0.85 ÷ $0.70). A subscriber who crosses the one-year mark is worth over a fifth more per dollar billed than an identical subscriber in month eleven, for zero additional work.
That reframes retention spending. Effort that pushes subscribers past twelve months — onboarding, a good annual option, win-back within the 60-day resumption window — pays twice: once in retained revenue, once in a better rate on it. For a developer above the Small Business Program threshold, month thirteen is a genuine step change in unit economics.
What Apple Does Not Tell You
An honest gap worth naming: Apple publishes no breakdown of App Store revenue by monetisation model. There is no official figure for what share comes from subscriptions versus paid-up-front versus in-app purchase, in the App Store Transparency Report or anywhere else. Any "X% of App Store revenue is subscriptions" claim you encounter comes from a third party with partial visibility — usually a vendor whose sample is drawn from its own customers, and therefore skewed toward whichever model those customers already use.
What Apple does publish is scale. Its 2025 App Store Transparency Report reports 2,172,472 apps on the store and 60,597,750 registered developers. Useful for calibrating how crowded the field is; useless for choosing your model. For that, your own category's revenue-per-download ratio beats any industry average, because it describes the customers you will actually be asking for money.
One further caveat with a date on it: in the United States, App Review Guideline 3.1.1(a) currently states that entitlements are "not required for developers to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action in their United States storefront apps" — the anti-steering prohibition that applies elsewhere does not apply there. Whether Apple may charge a commission on purchases made through those links is unsettled: no commission is collectible under the April 2025 district court injunction, the Ninth Circuit largely affirmed it in December 2025 while remanding for a rate to be set, and the Supreme Court granted review in mid-2026. If your pricing model depends on external purchase flows in the US, verify the current position before you build on it rather than trusting any article, including this one.
Pricing Mistakes That Cost the Most
Planning revenue on list price. You receive 70% or 85%, minus taxes. Every projection built on the sticker number is wrong by a predictable margin, and it compounds through the whole plan.
Forgetting to enrol in the Small Business Program. It is opt-in. Leaving it unclaimed is a voluntary 15-point commission increase.
Copying a successful app's price without checking its category. The price that works for a well-funded app with a brand and a five-year subscriber base is not a price a new app can charge into the same slot.
Choosing subscription in a category that does not subscribe. The revenue-per-download check takes minutes and prevents months of building a paywall the audience will never accept.
Pricing before validating the category. Price is the last decision in the sequence, not the first. If the category's revenue per download is $0.08, no price is correct, and the answer is a different keyword.
Treating price as permanent. It is one of the few things you can change without a release. Metadata is version-locked; price is not. Pick a defensible number, ship, and revisit with your own data.
Pull the Numbers for Your Category
The whole framework depends on one input: estimated revenue and estimated downloads for the top-ranking apps in your keyword, so you can compute the ratio.
App Store Operator is an MCP server that puts that data directly inside Claude — estimated monthly downloads, estimated monthly revenue, rating count, rating score, publisher country and top markets. Register it with one command:
claude mcp add --transport stdio app-store-operator -- npx -y app-store-operator@latest
Then run the pricing question directly:
Research the top rivals for "sleep tracker" in the US App Store, then compute estimated revenue per download for each and tell me which monetisation model this category supports.
Two of the four tools — search_app_store and prepare_iae — need no account at all. The two analytics tools, research_rivals and get_app_details, open a browser window once for a one-time sign-in to a free SensorTower account, then reuse that saved session locally. Results cache for 24 hours, so you can sweep several candidate categories in one sitting. The 60-second competitor research guide covers the query patterns worth learning first, and the use cases page walks through all four tools with the exact prompts.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Apple take from app sales?
Apple's standard rate leaves the developer 70% of the customer price after applicable taxes — a 30% commission. That rises to 85% for developers in the App Store Small Business Program, and for auto-renewable subscriptions after a subscriber accumulates one year of paid service. The Small Business Program applies to developers who earned no more than 1 million USD in proceeds in the previous calendar year, and to developers new to the App Store.
Should my iOS app be a subscription or a one-time purchase?
Let the category decide. Compute estimated monthly revenue divided by estimated monthly downloads for the top-ranking apps on your main keyword. A high ratio means the audience pays willingly and recurring value is expected — subscription territory. A low ratio means a free-forever audience where a subscription will convert badly no matter how good the app is. Subscriptions also require genuinely continuing value; without ongoing updates or content, churn will outrun acquisition.
How many price points does the App Store offer?
900, ranging from $0.29 up to $10,000 by request. Apple announced the expansion on 6 December 2022 for auto-renewable subscriptions and extended it to all apps and in-app purchase types on 9 March 2023, with increments of $0.10 up to $10 and $0.50 from $10 to $50.
What is the difference between sales and proceeds in App Store Connect?
Sales is the total amount billed to customers, inclusive of taxes Apple collects. Proceeds is what you actually receive — the customer price minus applicable taxes and Apple's commission. Apple states that sales totals are not the same as proceeds, and warns that proceeds shown in Sales and Trends are estimates until final financial reports close.
Does a free trial count toward the one-year subscription threshold?
No. Apple states that free trial periods and renewal extensions do not count toward the year of paid service that unlocks the 85% rate. The clock runs on paid days only. If a subscription lapses and the customer resubscribes within 60 days, accrual resumes rather than restarting.
Can I change my app's price after launch?
Yes, and this is one of the few things you can change without shipping a new version. Your title, subtitle and keyword field are version-locked; price is not. That asymmetry is a good reason to spend your pre-launch research time on keywords and treat the initial price as a defensible starting point rather than a permanent commitment.
Decide in the Right Order
Model, then number, then commission planning. Reversing that order is what produces an app with a beautifully tuned $4.99 price point in a category where nobody has paid for anything since 2019.
The one input that drives the whole sequence is your category's revenue-per-download ratio, and it takes a single query to get:
claude mcp add --transport stdio app-store-operator -- npx -y app-store-operator@latest
Once you have the numbers, what App Store download estimates actually tell you covers how far to trust them, the competition analysis framework turns them into an enter-or-avoid call, and the App Store keyword research guide covers the metadata decisions that are far harder to reverse than your price.
Run your first competitive research in 60 seconds.
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