Should your indie app sell a lifetime unlock?

A lifetime option feels like a gift to users and a gamble for you. It converts people who hate subscriptions, and it also hands your most engaged users a permanent discount. Whether it pays off comes down to arithmetic you can do on a napkin before you build anything.

What you're really selling

A lifetime unlock is one payment that you promise never to ask for again. The word to worry about is lifetime, and it's the lifetime of the app, not of the customer. You are pre-selling every future year of support, OS updates and server cost at a single price, to the people most likely to still be using the app in year five.

That is the structural problem. Subscriptions charge more to the people who get the most value. Lifetime charges them once. If your costs scale with usage, such as AI calls, cloud storage or sync, the heaviest users become the ones you lose money on, and they paid the same as someone who opened the app twice.

The napkin math: how many years to break even

Take an illustrative annual plan at $29.99 and a lifetime price you're considering. After the store's cut, you keep roughly 85 cents on the dollar if you qualify for the reduced commission tier on either store, and 70 if you don't. Rather than guess, compute the multiple:

• Lifetime at $59.99 is two years of the annual plan. Anyone who would have stayed past year two costs you money. Anyone who would have cancelled after one cost you nothing, because you earned twice as much.
• Lifetime at $89.99 is three years. Fewer people buy it, but a single purchase is worth three renewals.
• Lifetime at $149.99 is five years. It works as a high anchor that makes the annual plan look cheap, even if almost nobody buys it.

The number that matters is how long your annual subscribers actually stay. Look at your own renewal data: if most annual subscribers don't renew a second time, a lifetime price of two years' revenue is a raise. If a large share renew four or five times, the same price is a discount you've pre-announced. You can't know this before launch, which is the strongest argument for starting with subscriptions only and adding lifetime later, at a price chosen with real retention in hand.

Who buys it, and who you lose

Lifetime buyers are not a random slice of your subscribers. They are people who already expect to keep using the app, so the offer pulls forward revenue you might have collected anyway. That's cannibalisation, and it shows up as a drop in new annual subscriptions after you add the option.

The upside is a different group: people who would never subscribe to anything. Some users rule out subscriptions on principle, and for a utility with a one-time job, they're right to. If your app sits in that category, the lifetime tier isn't competing with the subscription at all; it's the only tier these users will consider. Look at your reviews and support email. Complaints about subscription pricing are the evidence; a hunch isn't.

The mechanics that bite later

On Apple, a lifetime unlock is a non-consumable in-app purchase. On Google Play it is a one-time product. Both stores work the same way in practice, and three details are easy to miss until they hurt.

• Restore has to work. Apple expects apps that sell in-app purchases to provide a way to restore them, and a lifetime buyer on a new phone with no restore button is a one-star review and a refund request. Test it on a device that has never run the app.
• Family Sharing is a one-way door on Apple. You can offer a non-consumable through Family Sharing, but once it's turned on you can't turn it off. A lifetime price that assumed one buyer now covers up to a household.
• Entitlements need to coexist. Someone on an active annual plan who then buys lifetime should not be billed again next year. Decide how your entitlement check ranks the two before you ship, and tell them to cancel the old plan in the store, because you can't do it for them.

Three ways to cap the risk

If the arithmetic says yes but the open-ended promise still worries you, there are structures that keep most of the benefit.

• Define the promise in writing. "Lifetime" can legitimately mean "all features that exist today, plus updates to this major version." Say so on the paywall. Then a future paid v2 is an honest upgrade, not a betrayal.
• Keep variable-cost features out of it. Make the one-time purchase cover the app, and sell anything that costs you per use, like AI generations or cloud storage, as credits or a small subscription on top.
• Price it so annual wins for most people. A lifetime tier at five times the annual price is rarely chosen, and it still lets the person who dislikes subscriptions buy in. You can lower it later. Raising it later annoys the people who were waiting.

The decision in one pass

Before shipping lifetime, answer four questions honestly. Does a meaningful share of your reviews push back on subscriptions? Do your annual renewals tell you how long people stay, and is that shorter than the multiple you'd charge? Is your marginal cost per user close to zero? Can you keep an app maintained for years on the revenue from one sale? Four yeses make lifetime a good bet. Two noes mean subscriptions only, for now.

Whatever you choose, the price on the paywall is only half the conversion. People weigh it against what they can see of the app, which for new users means the store screenshots.