Subscriber grandfathering

What subscriber grandfathering is

Subscriber grandfathering is the practice of leaving your existing subscribers on the price they signed up for when you raise the price, so only new subscribers pay the higher amount. It is the safest way to raise a subscription price, because nobody who is currently paying you sees a change, which sidesteps the cancellation risk that a price increase normally carries.

Both the App Store and Google Play support it, and for most first price increases it is the default move: you capture more revenue from every new subscriber immediately, you carry zero churn risk on your existing base, and you can always decide to raise the grandfathered cohort later once you have data on how the new price converts. The tradeoff is that your existing subscribers keep paying less, sometimes for years, so it is a revenue-now versus revenue-later choice, not a free lunch. Where the two stores stop looking alike is what happens when you do want to raise existing subscribers.

Grandfathering on the App Store

On the App Store, you plan a price change for the subscription in App Store Connect, per country or region, and Apple asks what to do about the people already paying. Choosing to keep the current price for existing subscribers is grandfathering, done with a single choice: anyone who subscribed before the change's start date keeps their old price, and only new subscribers pay more. A subscriber whose subscription lapses can even resubscribe at the preserved price within 60 days of expiration. Scheduled changes cannot be reversed, so plan the start date deliberately.

The alternative, applying the increase to existing subscribers, is unusually gentle on Apple. A small increase is just a notification (by email and push, 27 or 7 days before the next renewal) and the subscription renews at the new price with no action required. Consent is only required if the increase is steep or repeated: more than 50 percent of the current price and more than about 5 dollars per period (or 50 dollars per year for annual plans), or if the subscriber already had an increase in the past 12 months, or if they are in a region whose law requires consent. Those thresholds change over time, so check Apple's current rules before scheduling a large jump.

Grandfathering on Google Play

Google Play starts from the opposite default. Applying an increase to existing subscribers is opt-in: each subscriber has to actively accept the higher price before their next charge, and if they do not, Google Play cancels the subscription. There is no quiet renew-at-the-new-price path the way there is on Apple. So grandfathering on Google is simply choosing not to apply the increase to existing subscribers, leaving them on the old price while new subscribers pay more.

Google does offer an opt-out increase, where the subscriber is charged the new price on their next renewal after a notice period without having to do anything, which behaves more like Apple's quiet path. But it is only available in certain countries and regions, only to developers in good standing, and with a notice period of at least 30 or 60 days depending on the region, so you cannot rely on it as a default.

The pricing angle

Grandfathering decides who pays the new price. It does not decide whether the new price is right in each market. Raising your home price while every other country keeps a raw currency conversion of the old number just compounds a pricing mistake across 190 storefronts. A price increase is the moment you open your pricing anyway, so it is the moment to localize the base price per country to local purchasing power, not only to raise the home number.