Should my app be free, paid, or subscription?

The full split

Free vs freemium vs paid, side by side

Three models, five measures. "Earners" are apps with any estimated revenue signal; medians and ratings are computed within each model.

Source: GetAppNiche analysis of 744,874 iOS App Store apps, July 7, 2026 snapshot (dataset updated daily). All revenue figures are estimates, not audited numbers. How these odds compare with the store-wide revenue ladder — from any signal up to $100k/month — is covered in how many apps actually make money.

Share of apps in each model that clear an estimated $1,000/month. Freemium wins by roughly 7×. Labeled model estimates across 744,874 iOS apps, snapshot July 7, 2026. The free-app bar counts App Store revenue only — off-store income (ads, web SaaS) is invisible here, so treat it as a store-side floor.

The winner

Freemium dominates every revenue column

The gap isn't subtle. Freemium apps show an estimated revenue signal at 19.20% — roughly 3× the 6.07% rate of free apps — and clear an estimated $1,000/month at 13.76%: 7.6× the plain-free rate and 6.5× the paid rate. Even among the apps that do earn, the median freemium app's estimated $2,571/month is 8× the free-app median of $321 and ahead of paid's $2,132. The mechanism is structural: in-app purchases let one download turn into repeated revenue events, while a plain free app has no store-side revenue path at all and a paid app gets exactly one shot per user.

The niche

Paid upfront: a real model with a hard ceiling

Paid apps are down to 6.4% of the store — 47,815 apps — and the prices are modest: the median paid app costs $2.99, the 90th percentile is $12.99, and the maximum is $1,000. That median is the ceiling in one number: at $2.99, an app needs roughly 330 sales every month to gross an estimated $1,000 — before Apple's commission — and it has to find those buyers fresh each month, because nothing recurs. Paid's 2.12% odds of clearing an estimated $1,000/month do beat plain free's 1.81%, but they lose badly to freemium's 13.76%. Where paid still works is narrow: utilities and professional tools whose value is obvious before download. Which categories those tend to be is visible in average app revenue by category.

The essential caveat

Free apps' 1.81% only counts App Store revenue

Read the free-app row carefully before concluding that free apps don't make money. Our estimates model App Store revenue only — money that flows through Apple's payment system. Free apps without in-app purchases often monetize outside the store: ad revenue, SaaS products billed on the web, companions to retail or hardware businesses. None of that is visible to our signals, so the 1.81% figure is a floor for store-side revenue, not a verdict on the model. The honest reading: if your business model lives outside the App Store, "free with no IAP" can be entirely rational — but if you expect the store itself to pay you, plain free gives the model nothing to work with.

Where "subscription" fits

A note on subscriptions vs in-app purchases

Our price-model detection identifies in-app purchases, which include both subscriptions and one-time purchases — we cannot separate the two, so this page's split is honestly free / freemium / paid rather than free / subscription / paid. Industry consensus holds that most freemium revenue at scale is subscription-driven, which is consistent with our numbers but not something our data can independently confirm. What we can say from our own dataset: the freemium bucket that contains every subscription app is the best-performing model on every estimated revenue measure we track.

What this means

Four takeaways for choosing a model

• Default to freemium unless you have a specific reason not to. It leads on revenue-signal rate (19.20%), on the estimated $1,000/month bar (13.76%), and on earner median ($2,571/mo est.). No other single decision in the dataset moves the odds this much.
• Model choice won't cost you your rating. Median ratings barely differ: 4.68 for free, 4.60 for freemium, 4.50 for paid. Paid apps' slightly lower median hints that people who paid upfront judge harder — but the spread is 0.18 stars, not a reason to pick a model.
• Go paid only when the value is obvious pre-download — and price the math. At the median $2.99, an estimated $1,000 gross month takes ~330 fresh sales, before Apple's cut. If you can't see where those buyers come from every month, that's the freemium argument in one sentence.
• Plain free is a business-model statement, not a monetization strategy. 81.6% of the store ships free with no IAP, and store-side that monetizes worst by our measure. Choose it deliberately — because the money lives elsewhere — or don't choose it at all.