Introductory Offers and Pricing for App Subscriptions

An introductory offer is the cheapest way to lift subscription conversion, and one of the easiest to get wrong. It is the free trial or discounted first period a new subscriber sees before they commit to your full price. Done well, it turns hesitant installs into paying subscribers. Done carelessly, it is a discount off a price that was already wrong for the market, which is still wrong.

I have been shipping subscription apps since 2012, and introductory offers are one of the few monetization levers that are both easy to set up and easy to misjudge. The setup is a few fields in App Store Connect or Google Play Console. The judgment is knowing which type to use, who qualifies, and that the offer, like the base price, is set per country and inherits whatever pricing mistake sits underneath it.

This is the plain-English guide: what an introductory offer is, the three types Apple supports, how eligibility works, how Google Play does the same thing differently, and the one mistake that quietly wastes the discount. If you run an auto-renewable subscription and you are not using an intro offer, or you are running one without localizing it, this is 200 words that could move your conversion.

Offers pair naturally with a launch. If you are driving a day-one cohort with pre-orders or pre-registration, app pre-launch marketing covers how to line the two up.

What an introductory offer actually is

An introductory offer is a one-time incentive on a subscription, aimed at getting a new subscriber to start. It is not a permanent price. It applies to the first period or periods, then the subscription renews at your standard price.

The point is conversion, not generosity. A person who will not commit to $9.99 a month sight unseen will often start a free week or a discounted first month, and a meaningful share of them stay once they are in. That is why nearly every serious subscription app runs one. The offer lowers the risk of the first decision, and the standard price does the earning after.

It is worth separating an introductory offer from two things it gets confused with. It is not a coupon you email to lapsed users, and it is not a one-off promo code. Apple keeps those as separate mechanisms, and mixing them up leads to the wrong setup, which I will come back to. For now, the mental model is simple: an introductory offer is the discounted on-ramp shown automatically to eligible new subscribers on your product page, and it is configured per subscription, per country.

Apple's three types of introductory offer

Apple gives you three shapes for an introductory offer, and picking the right one is most of the decision (Apple's setup guide has the full detail).

The first is a free trial. The subscriber gets your subscription free for a set duration, then renews at the standard price. For example, one month free on a subscription that renews at $4.99 per month. This is the most common intro offer, and it works best when your app's value is obvious quickly.

The second is pay as you go. The subscriber pays a discounted price each billing period for a set number of periods, then moves to the standard price. For example, $1.99 per month for three months on a subscription that normally renews at $9.99 per month. This suits apps where value builds over a few weeks, so a low price across several periods beats a single free week.

The third is pay up front. The subscriber makes one discounted payment for a set duration, then renews at the standard price. For example, $9.99 up front for the first six months of a subscription that renews at $39.99 per year. This front-loads commitment and revenue, and it fits annual plans well.

Each type is a free trial or a discounted intro price, but the billing shape is different, and the right one depends on how fast your app earns trust. You can even run different offers for different plans in the same group.

Eligibility: one introductory offer per subscription group

Here is the rule that trips people up. An introductory offer is not available to everyone forever. Per Apple, new and returning customers are only eligible to use one introductory offer per subscription group. Once a customer has used an intro offer in a group, they see your standard price for anything else in that group.

The practical effect is that intro offers are a one-time on-ramp, not a recurring discount. You can have multiple offers within a subscription group, and Apple shows the eligible one automatically on your product page, but a given customer gets one bite. This is why you cannot use an intro offer to win back a churned subscriber who already took one. That is a different tool.

Which is the distinction worth nailing down. Apple keeps three separate mechanisms: introductory offers for the initial subscription, promotional offers for existing or lapsed subscribers you want to retain or win back, and offer codes, the alphanumeric codes you distribute for a specific deal. They look similar and they are configured in similar places, but they target different people. If you want to bring back a cancelled user, that is a promotional offer or an offer code, not an introductory offer. Setting up the wrong one is a common and quiet mistake.

How Google Play does introductory pricing

Google Play reaches the same goal through a different structure, so if you ship to both stores you configure this twice. On Google Play, a subscription has base plans, and each base plan can carry offers. An offer is where free trials and introductory pricing live, delivered through one or more phases (Google's subscriptions documentation covers the setup).

A free trial phase gives a set number of days, weeks, or months at no charge, and Google allows anything from 3 days to 3 years. An introductory pricing phase gives a discounted price for a fixed duration, and it has to be the same as or lower than the base plan price. You can express it as an absolute number or as a discount relative to the base. You can even chain phases, for example a seven-day free trial followed by a discounted first month, then the base price.

Eligibility works on the same principle as Apple's, defined by rules you set. A common new-subscriber offer is only available to users who have not previously purchased any of the app's subscriptions, and anyone who does not qualify simply sees the base plan with no trial or intro price. Google gives you room to work, up to 250 base plans and offers per subscription with as many as 50 active at once, which is more configuration than most apps will ever need, but the eligibility logic is the part to get right.

The trap: an intro offer on a mispriced base is still mispriced

Now the mistake that wastes the whole thing, and the reason this sits next to pricing rather than growth.

An introductory offer is a discount off your base price, and it is set per country on the same price-point ladder as that base price. So the offer inherits whatever is true of the base. If your base price is a raw currency conversion of your US number, your intro price is a discount off a number that was already wrong for the market. A "50% off the first month" in India, where the full price already sits at roughly three times the local purchasing-power price, is still too expensive. You gave up half your revenue and barely moved conversion, because the problem was never the offer. It was the base price underneath it.

This is why I treat the offer and the base as one job. Localize the base price to local purchasing power first, then layer the introductory offer on top of a number that already fits the market. A free trial that leads into a fair local price converts. A discount that leads into an unaffordable one does not, no matter how deep the discount. The full method for setting base prices that fit each country is the app pricing localization pillar, and the step-by-step execution is in the complete guide to localized pricing for mobile apps.

Handled together, the intro offer and the localized base compound. The offer lowers the first-decision risk, and the fair standard price keeps the subscriber once the offer ends. Handled separately, you are discounting a price that was already turning people away.

Set the offer, then get the price underneath it right

An introductory offer is one of the highest-return, lowest-effort levers in a subscription app. Pick the type that matches how fast your app earns trust, keep the eligibility model straight so you are not reaching for an intro offer when you mean a promotional one, and remember you are configuring it twice, once per store, and once per country inside each store.

Then do the part most apps skip: make sure the price the offer discounts is already right for the market. PricePush calculates purchasing-power-aligned base prices for 190+ countries and pushes them to both the App Store and Google Play in one step, so when you add an introductory offer, it is a discount off a number that already fits each country instead of one that does not. You can try it free on one app and see your own per-country gap first, and plans plus the founding lifetime offer are on the pricing page.