# What a puzzle game subscription actually costs you > A $4.99 monthly puzzle game is $180 over three years. Here is the arithmetic, the three ways games charge, and how to work out which one you are in. Source: https://apps.swtlm.com/blog/what-a-puzzle-game-subscription-costs · TLM Apps — focused mobile apps from a team of engineers. Published: 2026-08-15 · Updated: 2026-08-15 · TLM Software Design 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. Fifteen of our sixteen apps are free or one-time. Seven show ads in some form: five you cannot avoid, two only when you ask for a reward. Four of those seven run interstitials, and our Minesweeper currently has no way to buy them out at all, which is a fair thing to hold against it. The single subscription we sell is a meeting transcriber, and it is a subscription because it runs speech-to-text on every recording, which is a real recurring cost. No puzzle game we make is sold monthly. If one were, the paragraph above would be an argument against us. ## 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](https://apps.swtlm.com/blog/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](https://apps.swtlm.com/games), each card carrying its price and its ad behaviour before you tap anything — [Blockmatic](https://apps.swtlm.com/blockmatic), [Midnight Mahjong](https://apps.swtlm.com/mahjong-solitaire) and [Words Attraction](https://apps.swtlm.com/words-suite-game) among them. The reasoning behind putting that on the card rather than in the small print is set out on the [About page](https://apps.swtlm.com/about), 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](https://apps.swtlm.com/blog/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. ## Frequently asked questions **How much does a $4.99 a month game cost over three years?** About $180, assuming the price never rises. A one-time unlock at $2.99 costs $2.99 over the same three years, and over any longer period as well. **Why do so many small games use subscriptions now?** Because a one-time purchase pays once and a subscription pays every month, so the same number of players produces a far larger and more predictable revenue line. It is a good deal for whoever is running the business, which is a different question from whether it is a good deal for you. **Are ads cheaper for me than a subscription?** In money, yes. In time, less obviously — a thirty-second interstitial after every third round of a two-minute game is roughly a sixth of your playing time. Neither model is free; they take different things. **How do I find out what a game will charge me before installing?** On Google Play the price range appears under In-app purchases on the listing, and 'Contains ads' appears near the install button. On the App Store, In-App Purchases are listed on the product page with the top items and their prices. Both are on the page before you download. **Is a one-time unlock always better value?** For a puzzle game, usually — the content does not change much, so you are buying a finished thing. For an app with an ongoing service behind it, a subscription can be the honest model. The test is whether someone is paying a running cost on your behalf.