An introductory offer lowers what a new subscriber pays at the start, then the subscription renews at the regular price. It's a customer-facing discount on your price. The store's commission is a separate lever, covered in the Small Business Program guide.

Both stores support introductory offers, and they work differently enough that it pays to set them up on purpose.

How introductory offers work on the App Store

Apple's App Store Connect Help describes three types:

Free trial: the customer pays nothing for the offer period.
Pay up front: the customer pays one discounted amount that covers a set period.
Pay as you go: the customer pays a discounted price for each period over several periods.

Check the current help page before you build on these numbers. The durations you can pick depend on the length of the standard subscription. A monthly subscription, for example, can have a pay-as-you-go offer of 1 to 12 months, a pay-up-front offer of 1, 2, 3 or 6 months or 1 year, and a free trial from 3 days up to 1 year.

Three rules catch people out:

One offer per person per subscription group. Each person can redeem one introductory offer per subscription group, even if several products in the group have offers. Returning customers who already used one in that group aren't eligible for another.
Set per country. You choose the storefronts where an offer runs, and you can have one current and one future offer per storefront.
No edits. Once created, an offer cannot be changed. To adjust it, delete it and create a new one.

How introductory offers work on Google Play

Google Play handles this through subscription offers. The Play Console Help page on offers explains that an offer contains one or more phases, each one either a free trial, a single discounted payment or a discounted recurring payment.

Some details worth knowing:

Free trials can run from 3 days to 3 years, and a recurring discount can last between 1 and 52 billing periods.
You choose who is eligible: new customers who have never had the subscription or any subscription in the app, customers upgrading from a specific subscription, or a rule your own app decides.
Introductory prices can be set per region, and they must be the same as or lower than the base plan price.
Prices are subject to Google Play's minimum and maximum in each region.

The wider picture of how the two stores structure prices is in our price tier comparison.

How introductory offers interact with country pricing

This is the part most teams skip. An introductory offer is priced per country, so it inherits the same problem as your regular price.

On Apple, App Store Connect proposes comparable prices for all 175 storefronts, taking taxes and exchange rates into account, and you can override them for specific countries. If you leave the defaults, your introductory price in a lower-income market is a converted number, not a decision about what people there will pay.

Here's an illustration, not a real app. Suppose you offer the first month at half the regular price. If the regular price in a lower-income market is still a straight conversion from the US price, half of it can still be more than people there will pay. If you localize the regular price first, the same half-price offer sits in proportion to what that market can pay.

So set your country prices first, then build the introductory offer on top of them. Our price localization guide covers the first step, and the Turkey and Nigeria guides show what lower-income markets can look like.

When to use introductory pricing

An introductory offer fits when:

People need to experience the product before paying. A free trial lets them try it, and a discounted first period lowers the commitment.
Your paywall is losing people at the price. A smaller first payment can get them over the line.
A market is price-sensitive. A localized regular price plus a modest introductory offer is a combination to test there.

It fits less well when the product is cheap already, or when a trial mostly attracts people who never intended to pay. In both cases the discount buys little.

How to measure whether it worked

Measure the outcome that matters, not the first conversion.

Offer start rate. How many paywall views turn into an offer start.
Conversion to the regular price. How many offer starts are still subscribed after the first full-price renewal.
Retention after the first renewal. Whether people who started on an offer stay as long as people who did not.
Revenue per install, by country. The number that settles it, because a lower price with a higher conversion rate can still lose money.

Read each of these per country. An offer that works in one market can underperform in another. See our posts on running and measuring pricing experiments and free trial conversion benchmarks for ways to structure the comparison.

Key takeaway

Introductory pricing is a good tool and a quiet source of mistakes. Decide the regular price in each country first, then choose the offer type, then measure revenue per install against the version without it.

Are your country prices set before your offers are?

The free price audit shows a full diagnosis of your current prices against comparable apps. Exact optimal prices for each market come with Premium. Changes apply on your approval or within rules-based caps you set. Run a free price audit