App Store Price, Tiers, and Availability

App Store price starts with one number you understand. You pick a base country or region and a price point. Apple offers comparable prices on the other storefronts and can adjust those later for taxes and exchange rates. Your base price is not silently changed. Availability is not that system. Availability is whether the app is for sale in a territory at all. A country can be unavailable even if a price point exists for it.

Apple documents the setup in Set a price and the calendar in Schedule price changes for apps . Do not copy a tier chart from a blog. The points live in App Store Connect. If you are still choosing countries, read which countries to localize. A paid launch still needs the launch checklist.

Set a base, then let Apple map the rest

You must be able to set pricing before review, and you need the Paid Applications agreement in place for a paid app. Choose the country or region you know as the base. Apple says it uses that base to provide comparable prices on the other 174 storefronts. Prices for the base are not adjusted by Apple when taxes and exchange rates move. Other storefronts can be, and Apple says it will notify you before those changes. You can instead manage some storefronts yourself, or all of them, and then you own the tax and exchange updates.

The menu starts with 25 common price points. You can open more. Apple’s help says you can choose from up to 800 price points by default, and you can request an additional 100 higher points, up to 10,000 US dollars. Automatically generated prices account for foreign exchange and certain taxes, across 43 currencies. That is the system. It is not a table this article should freeze in dollars, because the row you see next month may not be the row printed here.

You can schedule a change

If you have accepted the Paid Apps Agreement and submitted the app for review, you can schedule price changes. Apple says a change can have a start and an end, or it can be permanent with no end. A promotional price for a month that then returns to the regular price is the example they give. Effective dates can be scheduled from today through the end of the next calendar year. The longest temporary price change is one year.

During a temporary change, Apple will not adjust prices in the countries you included, for that window. If the temporary change includes your base country, Apple’s help says it will not make automatic adjustments in all 175 countries or regions during those dates. Read that consequence before you put the base country on a short sale. You can also manually manage specific countries, or all of them. Manual management means Apple stops updating those prices for tax and exchange. You can view or delete many upcoming changes. Some tax or exchange adjustments cannot be removed.

Availability is a separate switch

Price answers “what does it cost here?” Availability answers “is it for sale here?” You can have a price point for a territory and still leave that territory off. You can turn a territory on without writing a custom price, in which case the comparable price from your base applies. Do not use a price of the highest tier as a pretend way to block a country. Turn the country off.

A soft launch is an availability decision plus a support decision. If you only want a few countries at first, turn those on and leave the others off. Localization does not turn a country on by itself, and a price does not translate your screenshots. When you later enable a territory, check the price Apple mapped and whether you can support the language people will write reviews in.

Worked example: a one-time drawing app

The app is a paid drawing tool, not a subscription. You pick your home storefront as the base and a price you would pay for this kind of tool. You glance at the comparable prices Apple fills in, and you manually set one country where the generated price looks oddly high for that currency. You leave every other storefront on Apple’s mapping. You do not publish a chart of all 175 prices on your website, because you do not want to maintain it.

You are not ready to support Japanese reviews, so Japan stays off in availability even though a price point exists. That is an availability choice, not a pricing trick. A month after launch you schedule a two-week introductory price with an end date, then the original price returns. You do not put the sale price in the screenshot, because the screenshot would lie when the schedule ends. The paywall, if you even show a purchase screen, should be the store’s price, not a number you typeset.

Set a base price, let Apple map the other storefronts, schedule sales with an end date, and use availability to turn territories off. Keep the dollar amount out of the screenshot.

Do not typeset the price into the listing

The product page already shows the price for the shopper’s storefront. A screenshot or description that prints your base currency will be wrong somewhere else, and it will be wrong again after a scheduled change. Apple also tells you to avoid specific prices in the description because pricing is on the page and may not be accurate in every region. Say it is a one-time purchase. Let the price button say the number.

Subscriptions are a different pricing system, with their own offers. If the drawing app were a renewing trial, the screenshots would have to match that offer, which is subscription screenshots. A one-time purchase should not borrow trial language. Pre-order has its own availability timing. Read the pre-order guide before you mix a pre-order with a scheduled sale.

What to check before you submit

Confirm the Paid Apps Agreement is accepted if the app is paid. Confirm the base country is the one you want Apple to leave alone. Skim the generated prices for the countries you turned on. Confirm territories you cannot support are off. Confirm no screenshot contains a currency amount. If a sale is scheduled, confirm the end date and that your base country is or is not included, knowing the automatic-adjustment pause that comes with including it.

Availability changes do not rewrite your keywords. If you turn a country on months later, localize only if you can support that language. Price, availability, and language are three switches. Flipping one does not flip the others.