Apple Announces New ‘Installment Plan’ for App Subscriptions

While it’s nowhere near as exciting as season 4 of Ted Lasso, Apple also quietly announced a pretty significant change to how in-app subscriptions can be sold on the App Store.

The first hint of this appeared in the developer release notes for iOS 26.5 beta 1, which told developers they’d soon be able to set up subscriptions with “a monthly with 12-month commitment billing plan.” That strongly suggested it would launch with iOS 26.5, and now Apple has made it official with an announcement in its developer news site:

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While developers will still need to opt in, this may soon allow folks to benefit from paying less for app subscriptions without emptying their wallet up front.

Until now, developers were only able to offer weekly, monthly, or annual subscriptions, all of which could be canceled at any time. Many developers — including Apple — offer annual subscriptions that are considerably cheaper than paying for 12 individual months, but those also require users to front the entire cost.

Under the new system, developers will be able to offer annual subscriptions with a monthly payment plan. Customers will still need to commit to 12 months, but instead of paying the full price right away, they’ll be billed monthly — without any option to end the subscription before their annual term expires.

Note that annual subscriptions won’t automatically offer a “pay-by-month” option. Developers have to specifically choose to offer this new subscription type, and they can do so alongside standard annual and monthly plans, and even set different rates for all three.

This means developers can still offer a deeper discount for a fully prepaid annual subscription while still offering a new monthly with 12-month commitment subscription for a better price than a standard monthly plan. That’s useful as some may still want to incentivize users to pay up front, although Apple has set a few reasonable limitations to ensure that things don’t get too out of hand: the total price of the full 12-month commitment can’t be less than the upfront price, but also can’t be more than 1.5 times that price.

From a commitment perspective, these will work just like normal annual subscriptions. In the same way you don’t get a refund if you cancel a prepaid annual subscription, the new “pay-monthly” subscriptions will continue to be billed every month until the end of the term; early cancelation will simply prevent auto-renewal.

Similarly, users who don’t cancel before the end of their commitment will continue to be billed monthly under a new 12-month commitment in the second year and beyond.

Apple has also added a new feature that will let users track completed and remaining payments for these subscriptions in their Apple Account, and optionally receive push notifications ahead of their renewal date to ensure they have time to reconsider before being renewed into another 12-month commitment.

Interestingly, the new pay-by-month annual subscriptions will be available to users on iOS 26.4, iPadOS 26.4, macOS 26.4, tvOS 26.4 and visionOS 26.4 — but notably not watchOS. However, while developers can start setting it up now, it won’t go live until iOS 26.5 comes out in May. The new subscription type is also slated to be available everywhere in the world except in the United States and Singapore. Apple hasn’t offered any reasons why these two countries are being left out, nor when we can expect that to change.