How to create a subscription in App Store Connect

A subscription group holds every variation of one product: monthly and annual plans, or basic and premium tiers. Customers can hold one active subscription per group, and Apple bills each group separately, so one group is right for most apps. App Store Connect warns you before you create a second.

Levels rank the plans inside a group, with level 1 offering the most. An upgrade starts immediately and refunds the unused part of the old plan, prorated; a downgrade starts at the next renewal. A crossgrade between plans on the same level is immediate when the durations match and waits for renewal when they don't. The group also caps introductory offers at one per customer, whichever plan they start on.

The durations are 1 week, 1, 2, 3 or 6 months, and 1 year. Renewals land on the same calendar day, so a subscription started on January 30 renews on February 28 (29 in a leap year), then March 30. App Review also expects an auto-renewable period of at least seven days (guideline 3.1.2(a)).

A 1-year subscription can also be sold as Monthly with 12-Month Commitment in every storefront except the United States. The customer pays monthly but commits to 12 payments, which must total between 1 and 1.5 times the upfront price. It needs devices on OS 26.4 or later and an app built with the 26.5 SDK or later.

That plan split changes the order of setup. Since App Store Connect API 4.4 every subscription price belongs to a plan type (UPFRONT or MONTHLY), and Apple documents availability for the plan first, then its prices. MetaRun learned this in production: the first price on a subscription created after the 4.4 change failed with "An error occurred while processing the pricing information" until the plan's availability was declared, while older subscriptions repriced fine. In App Store Connect the same order shows up as Set Up Availability under 1 Year Upfront before Add Subscription Price.

Family Sharing lets a subscriber share the subscription with up to five family members. Once you turn it on in App Store Connect, you can't turn it off. Existing subscribers have to opt in from their subscription settings, and if multiseat purchases are on, only the group purchaser can share.

Your first auto-renewable subscription and your first group must go to review with a new app version, all in the same draft submission. Since July 2026 you start from the subscription itself with Add for Review, and one submission holds up to 200 items. After the first approval, new subscriptions can be submitted without a version, as long as the app has an approved one.

Subscription and group localizations are reviewed separately from the product and carry their own status (Prepare for Submission, Waiting for Review, Approved, Rejected), so a rejected translation can hold things up while the product looks fine. Rejection reasons appear in the App Review section of the sidebar, under the submission's Messages.

Open the subscription, click the add button (+) in Subscription Prices, choose Plan Subscription Price Change, then pick storefronts, a start date and a price. App Store Connect works out the earliest date, generally 1 to 2 days ahead. You get one future change per storefront per billing plan; scheduling a second overwrites the first.

A decrease applies to existing subscribers at renewal and can't be reversed once live. For an increase you choose between keeping the current price for existing subscribers (they can even resubscribe at it within 60 days of expiring) and applying the change to them.

If you apply an increase to existing subscribers, Apple notifies them or asks for consent. Consent is required when their storefront requires it for any increase (Apple's threshold list marks Austria, Germany, Poland and South Korea), when the increase is over 50% and more than about US$5 a period (US$50 a year for annual plans), or when they already had an increase in the past 12 months. Anyone who doesn't consent expires at the end of their last period at the old price.

Consent requests start 60 days before renewal for 2-month to annual plans, 27 days for monthly and 7 days for weekly. Subscribers on an introductory or promotional price renew at least once more at the price they signed up for. If you've kept several cohorts on older prices, raise the cohort closest to the current price first, so nobody gets two increases.

Setting up a subscription by hand takes a group, a reference name, a product id you can never reuse, a duration, a display name and description per language, a price schedule, availability, and a review screenshot. In-app purchases need most of the same.

Your agent can do the whole chain through MetaRun. Creates return the new product's id, so the next preview (copy, price, availability) can name it immediately.