Apple's New “Monthly with 12-Month Commitment” Subscription — What It Is and How to Price It

A new subscription type has appeared in App Store Connect, and it fills a gap that's existed since in-app subscriptions launched.

It's called Monthly with 12-Month Commitment. The name describes it exactly: the customer commits to twelve months, but pays monthly rather than in one lump.

How it works

From Apple's own description in App Store Connect:

Customers will commit to paying the monthly price for 12 months before their subscription renews.

The important mechanic is what happens on cancellation. If a customer cancels partway through, they keep paying until the commitment is complete — the subscription simply doesn't renew at the end. It's a genuine commitment, not a monthly plan with a discount attached.

Availability

Two separate requirements, and it's worth being precise about them:

• Devices must be on operating system version 26.4 or later (watchOS excluded)

• Your app must be built with an SDK version of 26.5 or later

So this is an iOS 26.5-era feature from a build perspective, but the customer's device needs 26.4 as a floor. Either way, your addressable audience for this plan is the slice of your users on current OS versions — plan your pricing on the assumption that it starts small and grows.

Why this matters

Until now the subscription choice was a genuine trade-off for both sides:

• Monthly — low friction, easy for the customer to say yes to, easy for them to churn out of next month

• Annual — much better retention and cash flow for you, but a large up-front payment that a lot of users won't clear

The annual plan has always had a conversion problem that has nothing to do with the value of the product. £60 up front is a bigger psychological hurdle than £5 a month, even when the £5 a month is the worse deal.

This new type separates the two things that were previously welded together: commitment length and payment size. You get annual retention with monthly-sized payments.

How I'd price it

Here's the structure I think makes sense. Three tiers, each one doing a specific job:

• Monthly (rolling) — £6.99/month, £83.88 a year

• Monthly, 12-month commitment — £4.99/month, £59.88 a year

• Annual (paid up front) — £54.99

The logic:

Price the committed plan below your rolling monthly. The customer is giving you twelve months of certainty. They should get something obvious for it, and the per-month number is what they'll compare.

Keep the total at or slightly above the up-front annual. This is the part worth getting right. If the committed plan's total comes out cheaper than paying annually up front, you've cannibalised your best plan — you've taken customers who would have handed you a year's revenue on day one and converted them into a twelve-month payment stream instead.

Make the up-front annual the cheapest total, and you preserve the incentive to pay in one go while still capturing everyone who was never going to.

The committed plan isn't there to replace your annual. It's there to catch the users who bounce off the annual price tag and would otherwise land on rolling monthly and churn in six weeks.

The open questions

I'm genuinely unsure how this lands with users, and there are a few reasons for caution.

Commitment is a hard sell in an app. The reason people like app subscriptions is that they can leave. Telling a customer they're locked in for a year is a real objection, and it needs to be worth something to them.

"Cancel but keep paying" will surprise people. Most users have never encountered this in an app before — it's phone-contract logic, not App Store logic. Expect some support tickets and some angry reviews from people who didn't read the terms.

It needs to be presented clearly. Given Apple's own guidelines on subscription price clarity, a plan with a commitment attached needs the terms visible at the point of purchase, not buried. Do this badly and you're inviting a rejection.

Worth trying?

Probably, if you already have a healthy annual plan and can see the drop-off at the price. It's a low-risk addition — a third option that costs you nothing to offer and doesn't change the two you already have.

I'll be interested to see whether it takes off, or whether it turns out that App Store users simply don't want to be locked into anything.