What a puzzle game subscription actually costs you

A puzzle game at $4.99 a month costs about $180 over three years, and that assumes the price never rises. The same game sold once at $2.99 costs $2.99 over three years, or over ten. The gap is not a rounding error or a matter of taste. It is roughly sixty times, and it is the single most useful number to have in your head before you tap through a paywall.

Do the arithmetic on your own numbers

Type in what the game in front of you is asking for.

Two things people underestimate. The first is how long they keep a game they like: a puzzle you open at bedtime survives several phones. The second is that a monthly charge is designed not to be noticed, which is what makes the three-year column the honest one.

The three models, and what each one takes

Every game you install is one of these. None of them is free.

Free with ads. You pay in attention and time. The meaningful number is not “has ads” but how often and how long: a thirty-second unskippable interstitial after every third round of a two-minute game costs you roughly a sixth of your playing time, forever.

Free with a one-time unlock. You play for nothing, and a single payment either removes the ads or opens the rest of the content. Once. This is the model most of the puzzle games we build use.

Subscription. You pay every month for as long as you have it, and stop having it the month you stop paying. That is an honest model for a service with a running cost behind it: storage, transcription, anything that bills a server per use. For a puzzle whose content shipped inside the download, it is a business decision wearing a product’s clothes.

Why the subscription showed up in a puzzle game

Not because the game got more expensive to run. Almost nothing in a finished puzzle game costs the studio anything per player per month: the levels are in the download, the art is done, there is often no server at all.

It showed up because of what it does to the revenue line. A one-time unlock gives a studio one payment per player, ever, which makes every month’s income depend on finding new players. A subscription turns the same players into a figure that recurs whether or not anyone new arrives. That is a genuinely better business, which is why so many small games converted, and it explains the shape of the conversion: content that used to be in the box moved behind the paywall, so there is something to keep paying for.

How to tell what a game will charge you, before installing

Both stores put this on the page. It is small, and it is there.

Google Play

• Contains ads appears near the install button when the app serves ads.
• In-app purchases appears with a price range — $0.99 – $9.99 per item — which tells you the ceiling as well as the entry price.
• The range does not distinguish a one-time unlock from a monthly one. For that, read the description.

App Store

• In-App Purchases is listed on the product page, with the most popular items and their prices.
• A name ending in Monthly, Yearly, Plus or Pro is usually a subscription. A name like Remove Ads or Unlock All Levels usually is not.
• Manage Subscriptions in your account settings is the authoritative list of what you are actually paying for right now. It is worth reading once a year.

The same listing pages carry the ad and privacy disclosures a parent needs, and they work the same way. What to check before installing a kids app walks through those.

What you keep when you stop paying

This is the question the price comparison hides, and it is worth asking before the first payment rather than after the last one.

A one-time unlock is yours. It is attached to your store account, it restores on a new phone, and on both stores it can be shared with a family group if the developer enabled that. Stop opening the app for two years, come back, and the content is still unlocked.

A subscription ends when the payments do. The levels, the hint balance and often the themes go back behind the paywall the day it lapses. Your progress usually survives, because it is stored locally — but progress through content you can no longer open is not much of a consolation.

There is a third case worth naming: consumable currency. Coins, hints and lives are bought and then spent, so there is nothing to restore and nothing to inherit. An app whose purchase range runs from under a dollar to near a hundred is almost always selling these, and it is the only model where paying more does not get you closer to owning anything.

Two practical notes. A free trial on either store converts to a paid period automatically unless you cancel before it ends, and cancelling immediately still leaves you the time you paid for — there is no reason to wait. And a subscription price can be raised on an existing subscriber with notice, which is why the three-year column in the calculator above is a floor rather than an estimate.

A rule of thumb that survives contact with a store page

Ask one question: is someone paying a running cost on my behalf?

Cloud storage, live multiplayer, transcription, anything that costs the studio money every time you use it — a subscription is the model that matches the cost, and a one-time price for an unbounded service is a promise nobody can keep.

A board, a tile set and six hundred levels that came down with the app have no running cost. If those are behind a monthly charge, you are renting something that was finished before you arrived.

Our puzzle games are on the Games page, each card carrying its price and its ad behaviour before you tap anything — Blockmatic, Midnight Mahjong and Words Attraction among them. The reasoning behind putting that on the card rather than in the small print is set out on the About page, and it is the same reasoning as this article.

If the game is for a child rather than for you, what to check before installing a kids app is the version of this check written for a store listing you are reading over someone’s shoulder at bedtime.