Supporting monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment

Overview

A monthly subscription with a 12-month commitment is an auto-renewable subscription that bills monthly and has a yearly commitment. The commitment automatically renews for another 12-month commitment after all 12 payments are complete, unless the customer cancels before the renewal date. By comparison, a standard annual subscription bills customers once, up front; it renews for a year, with a single up-front payment, unless the customer cancels.

Within your app, each billing period behaves like a standard monthly subscription — each period produces an independent transaction and grants one month of access. The distinction is that the customer has committed to the full year, so billing continues through all 12 periods even if the customer cancels the commitment renewal early.

Supporting a monthly subscription with a 12-month commitment involves the following steps:

• Configuring the subscription in App Store Connect, including planning for upgrades and downgrades

• Merchandising the subscription for customers to purchase

• Initiating the purchase

• Handling the transaction and entitlements

• Displaying the commitment progress

This feature requires using Xcode 26.5 SDK or later. You can deploy monthly subscriptions with 12-month commitments worldwide (except the United States and Singapore) to customers with devices running iOS 26.4, iPadOS 26.4, macOS 26.4, tvOS 26.4, and visionOS 26.4 or later.

Use App Store Server Notifications V2 to manage the subscription life cycle on your server. Transactions are available in your app through StoreKit, and on the server through the App Store Server API and App Store Server Notifications APIs.

This article uses the term commitment plan to refer to a monthly subscription with a 12-month commitment.

Understand the customer experience

The first time a customer subscribes to a monthly subscription with a 12-month commitment, the system automatically presents a one-time disclosure sheet. This sheet explains the number of monthly payments and provides cancellation guidance. The system shows it once per Apple Account, and it requires no action from you.

In subscription settings, customers see a commitment module that displays how many payments remain and when their commitment renews. A cancellation applies to the annual renewal, not to the remaining months in the commitment period. If a customer initiates cancellation, a message on the cancellation sheet reminds them of their commitment status and the number of remaining payments. After canceling, the customer can view the remaining scheduled payments for the commitment period.

Understand the billing plan type

Every auto-renewable subscription carries a Product.SubscriptionInfo.BillingPlanType value that describes how the subscription bills. There are two billing plans:

• An up-front billing plan type is the default for standard auto-renewable subscriptions. The subscription bills in full, up front, for the billing period.

• A monthly billing plan type applies only to monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment. The subscription bills at the monthly rate, once a month, for the duration of the commitment.

The transaction information in StoreKit and the server APIs provides the billing plan type, as follows:

The product metadata, transactions, and subscription renewal information contain this value.

Configure the subscription in App Store Connect

A monthly subscription with a 12-month commitment isn’t a new product type; you configure it directly on an existing yearly auto-renewable subscription in App Store Connect. The product ID and subscription group remain the same — you add a new billing plan to an existing product.

To configure the billing plan:

1. Log in to App Store Connect.

2. Navigate to your app’s In-App Purchases section and select the yearly auto-renewable subscription you want to update.

3. Enable the monthly billing plan type for that product.

4. Set a monthly price per territory.

Because both the up-front annual plan and the monthly commitment plan share the same product ID, customers and your app interact with a single subscription product that now offers two billing options.

Manage subscription groups for upgrades and downgrades

When configuring subscriptions in App Store Connect, you place subscriptions in subscription groups. The order in which subscriptions appear in a group determine the upgrade, downgrade, and cross-grade choices that customers see for each group.

Plan changes within a subscription group follow the existing upgrade, downgrade, and crossgrade rules with a few commitment plan-specific behaviors, as follows:

• Upgrades are immediate. When a customer upgrades from a commitment plan to a higher-tier subscription, the commitment ends immediately and the new plan activates. Customers may receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of the commitment’s current period.

• Downgrades are deferred. When a customer selects a lower-tier plan, the change takes effect at the end of the current 12-month commitment. The customer continues on the commitment plan and its billing schedule until the commitment completes.

• Cross-grades follow timing rules that depend on the plan duration and the billing plan type of both the current and target plans. Refer to the App Store Connect documentation for crossgrade timing details.

Plan the tiers in your subscription group carefully to achieve the desired upgrade, downgrade, and cross-grade behavior.

Merchandise monthly subscriptions with 12-month commitments

Use the Product API to fetch information for all your In-App Purchases, including monthly subscriptions with 12-month commitments. Use this information to display a store within your app to offer In-App Purchases.

To specifically identify monthly subscriptions with 12-month commitments, check the pricingTerms property in SubscriptionInfo. This array returns one entry for each available billing plan. For a 1-year subscription with monthly billing enabled, it contains two entries:

• The standard annual billing plan, with billingPlanType equal to .upFront

• The monthly commitment plan, with billingPlanType equal to .monthly

By comparison, a standard subscription returns only the first entry, with the billingPlanType equal to .upFront.

Each entry in a pricingTerms object contains the following properties:

The following code example filters the product’s list of pricing terms to find the billing information for the 12-month commitment:

if let commitmentTerms = product.subscription?.pricingTerms.first(where: { $0.billingPlanType == .monthly }) {
    let monthlyPrice = commitmentTerms.billingDisplayPrice
    let totalCommitmentPrice = commitmentTerms.commitmentInfo.price
    // Display both monthly and total commitment amounts to the customer before purchase.
}

You’re required to display both the monthly billing price and the total commitment amount to the customer before they initiate a purchase.

Provide subscription offers

Subscription offers—including introductory offers, promotional offers, win-back offers, and offer codes—are specific to each billing plan. When you fetch the pricing terms for a product, pricingTerms for a Product, each entry’s subscriptionOffers property contains only the offers that apply to that billing plan.

To display offers for the commitment plan, read the subscriptionOffers property from the pricing terms entry where the Product.SubscriptionInfo.BillingPlanType is monthly.

Initiate a purchase

To initiate a purchase for a commitment plan, use the same product.purchase(options:) call you already use for other subscriptions. The only addition is a new purchase option, a Product.SubscriptionInfo.BillingPlanType set to monthly, which tells StoreKit which billing plan the customer is purchasing for the subscription.

The following code example initiates a purchase for a monthly subscription with a 12-month commitment:

let result = try await product.purchase(options: [.billingPlanType(.monthly)])

switch result {
case .success(let verificationResult):
    // Verify and process the transaction.
case .pending:
    // The purchase requires action from the customer. 
case .userCancelled:
    // The customer canceled the purchase.
@unknown default:
    break
}

When the customer successfully completes the purchase, StoreKit delivers a new transaction through the Product.PurchaseResult, as shown in the code example above. Subsequent monthly renewals deliver a new transaction through the updates sequence in Transaction.

Grant access based on entitlements

Each billing period in a commitment plan produces a new, independent transaction. Granting access to the monthly subscription with a 12-month commitment works the same way as for a standard monthly subscription.

The simplest way to determine entitlements in your app is to check currentEntitlements, which produces a sequence of the latest transactions that entitle a customer to In-App Purchases and subscriptions.

You can also check each transaction (Transaction) to verify the following:

• The expirationDate property is in the future for the current billing period.

• The revocationDate property is absent.

• The isUpgraded property is false.

If these conditions are met, grant the customer access to the subscription for that billing period. These conditions are the same for standard subscriptions, so if your app already handles standard subscriptions, you can use the same logic.

Distinguish between period and commitment expiration

Transactions for commitment plans include two distinct expiration date fields. It’s important to use each field for its intended purpose, as follows:

Display commitment progress

To show customers the number of months remaining in their commitment, call showManageSubscriptions(in:) or showManageSubscriptions(in:subscriptionGroupID:) to open the system-provided subscription management page. The system displays the billing progress, next payment date, and commitment renewal date.

To get the same information about the subscription commitment, read the commitmentInfo from the latest transaction. The following fields provide the details:

billingPeriodNumber

The current billing period number, for example: 2 of 12.

totalBillingPeriods

The total number of periods in the commitment (12).

expirationDate

The date the full commitment ends.

price

The total cost of the full commitment.

See Also

Product and subscription information

• Implementing a store in your app using the StoreKit API
• Managing the life cycle of monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment
• Product
• Product.SubscriptionInfo
• SubscriptionInfo
• SubscriptionStatus