4

I am developing news reader app, and client wants to have monthly subscription. This is easy enough, but he wishes to have one month of free trial for each user. So after user downloads app for the first time, he has one month of free use and after that period, he has to pay subscription fee (auto renewable subscription).

I am stuck on how to implement this. Any ideas? Preferably without need to connect to my server and handle user registrations and trials from there.

Thanks!

Lope
  • 5,388
  • 4
  • 30
  • 40
  • 1
    By the way, don't use the word "trial" anywhere in your app or the description. It's against Apple's policies and they may reject it. – Andrew Mar 07 '12 at 09:37
  • 1
    FYI I've seen apps that uses that word in the App store, so it looks like they don't enforce this rule anymore – Enrico Susatyo Apr 30 '13 at 11:32

2 Answers2

2

When you select Auto-Renewable Subscriptions you'll add Duration Information. When you adding duration set Offer a marketing opt-in incentive? option to YES. You'll get Option Box for how many days or months or year you want subscription. Check this free subscription answer here.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
arthankamal
  • 6,341
  • 4
  • 36
  • 51
  • Great answer! This answers the question and should be marked as the correct answer. – AlexR Dec 18 '13 at 17:31
  • 2
    This is an incorrect answer, the relevant option is `Offer a Free Trial`. Marketing incentive is a different thing: `An additional amount of time added to the initial subscription when customers choose to share their contact information with you. You can set the duration of the incentive to be the same length as the subscription duration or shorter. There is no charge added for the additional time.`. – zrslv Sep 22 '14 at 11:29
2

If you handle in on the client side, then whatever scheme you manage to design, the user can restart with a new free trial period very easily: s/he only has to delete and reinstall the app. Since this will erases any local app data, you won't have any way to know whether s/he has already use the trial offer.

You will have to handle that server side.

Jean-Denis Muys
  • 6,772
  • 7
  • 45
  • 71
  • I was afraid this might be true, but I was hoping there is some solution using combination of subscription and other items (consumable or otherwise) but as you can't sell free items that probably wont be possible :( – Lope Sep 22 '11 at 09:32
  • 1
    I don't think there's any reliable way to do it without a server. But if it takes a little effort to set up your news subscriptions, then having to do that each time you delete and re-install the app should be enough to keep out the freeloaders. Some people will still do it, but those are people you'll never get money out of anyways. – Christopher Pickslay Sep 23 '11 at 04:06
  • I decided to go with server solution, it is easy enough to implement, but it is kinda sad that apple doesn't support this natively, I am sure lot of developers would appreciate it – Lope Sep 23 '11 at 18:03
  • Can I ask how you resolved this? Did you store the initial subscription (first time run) with unique identifer on your server, or implement it another way? – zardon Nov 02 '11 at 18:23