Auto-renewable subscriptions can have **free trial offers** of various durations. The supported lengths are 3 days, 1 week, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, and **1 year**. So technically yes — a 1-year free trial of a $19.99/year subscription is allowed.
But the catch: **Apple's free trials require credit card upfront.** The user has to "subscribe now, billing starts in 365 days." Most users abandon at that screen. Friction is enormous.
## Four models worth considering, honestly compared
### Model A - Free trial → paid (your original idea)
**1 year free, then $19.99/year, credit card required upfront**
### Model B - Custom "soft" trial → paid
**Free for 365 days from install (no payment info), then paywall**
### Model C - Freemium (my recommendation)
**Core app free forever; Insights tab requires subscription ($19.99/year)**
### Model D - One-time purchase
**$9.99 or $19.99, pay once, own forever**
## My take, for *this* app specifically
**Model C - Freemium with Insights as the paid tier.** Here's why it fits Oneirograph uniquely:
1. **Your value proposition splits cleanly.** Dream/daily journaling = utility (commodity, free). Cross-dream pattern analysis = differentiated insight (paid). The split is honest, not arbitrary.
2. **Patterns require ≥30 dreams to be meaningful.** This is *built into the data* a user with 5 dreams sees nothing useful in the Insights tab. The paywall placement is therefore self-reinforcing: by the time the user wants Insights badly enough to pay, they're already a committed user.
3. **The committed-user hypothesis still holds.** You're right that only repeat users will pay. Model C selects for them automatically and gives them *exactly* what they came for. You don't need a time-based hammer to enforce it.
4. **The medical-adjacent angle.** Charging for journaling itself ("pay to write down your feelings") is awkward in mental-health territory. Charging for analysis ("you've done the work; here's what we see") is squarely value-aligned.
## What "Free for a year" still gets you
If you really want a generous trial *and* the freemium model, you can combine them:
**Insights free for the first 30/60/90 days after install**, then subscription required. New users get to see what Insights looks like with sample/their early data, get hooked on the visual, and the paywall kicks in once they have enough data for it to truly matter. Most freemium apps do exactly this.
## Pricing thoughts
$29.99/year is in the right range. Compare:
Offer both: $4.99/month, or $29.99/year, for the Insights tab.
** The Pyschologist side **
We want to encourage psychologist's who work with dreams to use our app to help analyze their patients,
but they do not have to pay for that: they just get their patients to pay for it! Then we add a
'Psycholigist's access'
button that automatically shares a users content (that which is stored in their own iCloud and is private only to them) with that pyschologist. I'll have to make this version which will be sophisticated because it will be able to load different patients, and keep them separate. And they will have to pay for it, like a one time fee up front, say $35.99, to just get the app, and this will discourage non-pycholigists who need it for professional reasons, from just getting. No one will pay that to try out something, or explore it.