Free vs Paid Apps
Compare free and paid app patterns by category, including where paid apps still hold pricing power.
Pricing snapshot
App Pricing Lab currently tracks 136.1K apps. In this dataset, 122.2K are free, 13.9K are paid, and 17.9K show in-app purchase signals. The highest-value pricing research usually comes from comparing category norms, not from looking at one app in isolation.
Categories where paid apps still matter
| Category | Apps | Paid share | Avg paid price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Games | 18.1K | 4% | $141 |
| Education | 10.5K | 9% | $220 |
| Utilities | 8.5K | 8% | $33.20 |
| Health & Fitness | 7.2K | 5% | $14.30 |
| Business | 7.0K | 3% | $25.66 |
| Lifestyle | 6.7K | 6% | $6.23 |
| Productivity | 6.5K | 9% | $106 |
| Finance | 6.1K | 4% | $5.87 |
| Entertainment | 5.6K | 7% | $72.38 |
| Shopping | 4.4K | 2% | $13.82 |
| Photo & Video | 4.1K | 10% | $145 |
| Music | 4.0K | 15% | $29.76 |
| Food & Drink | 3.8K | 6% | $6.69 |
| Sports | 3.5K | 10% | $6.27 |
| Travel | 3.5K | 7% | $83.54 |
Practical tips
Compare category norms
Use category pages to separate normal premium pricing from unusual outliers.
Check IAP depth
An app with many IAP items may have a very different total cost than its download price suggests.
Watch recent changes
Recent IAP changes can reveal new subscription tiers, discounts, or packaging experiments.
Data source
App Pricing Lab generates this page from crawled Apple App Store and Google Play data in its D1 database: app details, rankings, paid price fields, IAP snapshots, and detected IAP catalog changes. The page changes as the crawler discovers new apps and refreshes pricing data.