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What an ASO tool should cost, and when to pay

Sam · Published November 4, 2026 · Markdown

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An ASO tool for an indie developer should be free for the first app and paid at the point where the work actually scales: a second app, rivals, more storefronts, longer history. It should never charge for the basic daily rank, never show a paywall on launch or on a timer, and never need a trial to prove itself, because the free plan is the trial. That is how we priced RankASO, and this post is the reasoning, without the numbers, because the App Store sets those per country and shows them in the app before you buy.

Free is the product, not a teaser

A free plan that checks one app's 30 keywords in two storefronts every morning, reads the top 10 on each term, reports which words in the keyword field earn anything, runs the rule checker and keeps 90 days of history is a complete ASO tool for one app. It is what most indie developers need for most of a year. We made it free because a free plan that is secretly a demo teaches people to leave, and because the daily rank should never be the thing you pay for.

Pay where the work scales

The paid plan starts where one phone's worth of attention is no longer enough:

• A second app, and the third and tenth.
• Rivals, with their ranks read from your searches, the Gaps list, Strengths and the removal watch.
• Storefronts, from two to all 175.
• History forever, instead of the last 90 days.
• The optimizer, which writes a keyword field from the terms you already win.

Each of those is a real increase in what the app does for you, and each is the thing a growing studio asks for next. None of them is a basic feature held back.

The paywall only appears at a limit

You see the paywall when you add keyword 31, your first rival, a third storefront or a second app, and only then. Never on launch, never after a countdown, never as a banner on the Today screen. If you never hit a limit you never see it, and that is the correct outcome for a one-app studio.

Four ways to pay, one of them final

Monthly for the month you are doing a launch. Quarterly for a season of work. Yearly as the default, because ASO is a yearly habit and the yearly plan costs the least per month. And a one-time lifetime unlock for people who, like us, would rather own the tool. The yearly and lifetime plans share with your family through Apple. There is no free trial, because the free plan already is one, and a trial that converts by being forgotten is a trick.

What you are not paying for

There is no account, so you are not paying for a server to hold your keyword list. There is no analytics, so you are not paying for the infrastructure that watches you. Nothing is collected, so there is no data to sell on the side. The price buys the features above and nothing hidden, and it is the same price whether you read this post or not.

Download on theApp StoreFree to start. No account. Data Not Collected.

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