No ads, no subscription: why Tare is free to start and $2.99 once

Tare is out today, and the price fits in a sentence: the download and the first 20 levels are free for good, and one $2.99 purchase opens the other 60. There are no ads, no subscription and nothing else to buy.

Here is the model in full, then why it ended up this way, including the paid-app plan it replaced and the purchase App Review couldn’t find.

What’s free, what’s $2.99, and what’s never sold

The price on the unlock screen comes from the App Store, so it shows your own currency. $2.99 is the US base, and Apple sets the equivalent in every other storefront. The app has no price written into it anywhere.

Where the offer appears, and where it doesn’t

You can open the purchase from three places:

• the Open Chapters II–IV button under Chapter I on the chapter wall, which carries no price;
• any unlit level of Chapters II–IV;
• the same button in Settings, directly above Restore purchases.

It never opens by itself: not at launch, not when you come back, not after a solve, and not over the celebration when you finish Chapter I. In that last case the wall simply returns with the button in view. Nothing inside a level advertises, and the pause menu has no offer. The unlock is also not a promoted purchase on the App Store page, which would sell it to someone who has never hung a weight.

Levels in chapters you haven’t bought are drawn in full but darkened, with no padlock. In Tare a padlock means that playing on will open a level, and playing alone will never open a chapter you haven’t bought. VoiceOver says “not purchased” for the same reason, never “locked”. Your star total is not shown on the unlock screen either: a total next to a Buy button looks like something being priced, and nothing in the game is gated on stars.

The plan before this one

Until 2 September, Tare was going to be a paid app: $3.99 up front, with “In-App Purchases: none” on the store page. The reasoning was about strangers judging six screenshots. A solo developer with no track record can’t ask much from someone deciding that way.

On 1 September I played the first two finished chapters and found every level a single flat beam, which the post on solving balance puzzles covers. The next day, alongside rebuilding the 80-level arc, I made Chapter I free and put Chapters II to IV behind one purchase.

A free chapter removes the screenshot question. By the time anyone sees the price, they have solved twenty levels, read their first picture cards and watched a “?” open. The launch plan puts it plainly: the free chapter, not the price tag, is now what does the persuading. The store description also says exactly what’s free in its second line, because a free listing that doesn’t say so reads like a demo.

Why $2.99, and why it won’t be on sale

$2.99 is the lowest price the launch plan considers still reads as something crafted rather than a trinket. It is set once in US dollars, with worldwide automatic pricing.

There is no launch discount, and the plan rules out discounts for the first year. Its judgement is that no price below $2.99 would earn back what it costs in credibility. It also means that, for the first year at least, nobody who buys early pays more than someone who waits for a sale.

Why no ads, subscription or consumables

Tare has no networking code. It plays the same in airplane mode, and its App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected. Ads would mean network code and a third-party SDK in a game built to have neither.

The purchase leaves the label as it was. StoreKit is Apple’s own store, not an SDK the game reports through. The game records nothing about the purchase beyond the fact that the chapters are open, and no analytics are attached to the offer: not when it is shown, not when it is dismissed.

Subscriptions and consumables are ruled out entirely; the plan’s words are “no consumables, no subscriptions, ever”. The blueprint describes Tare as a crafted object, and it is sold like one: once. Hints cost a star, not money. Nothing in a level can be bought, and stars and canvases can only be earned. If anything else is ever sold, the plan limits it to optional cosmetic theme packs released alongside free levels, and the canvases you earn would never be part of them.

Buying once should mean owning it

• Family Sharing is on. One purchase covers your family group, and the game treats a shared purchase exactly like your own.
• Restore purchases is always visible, in Settings and on the unlock screen, whether or not you’ve bought anything. On a new device you have to be able to find it before it has anything to restore.
• Once granted, the unlock stays. The app clears it only when the App Store reports the purchase revoked, for example after a refund, and never because the store couldn’t be reached. Locking a paying player out of an offline game to re-check a purchase is a failure the design rules out.
• Chapters still open in order. Chapter II opens when 16 of Chapter I’s 20 levels are solved, and the unlock screen says the chapters open in order before you pay, so buying at level 3 isn’t a surprise. Within a chapter you can skip past up to three unsolved levels, so no single puzzle walls you off.
• No error codes. If the App Store doesn’t answer, the unlock screen shows Try again, with Restore and the terms still there, and the button on the wall stays where it was.

The purchase App Review couldn’t find

The offer turned out to be too quiet. App Review answered the first 1.0 submission with Guideline 2.1(b), Information Needed: it could not locate the in-app purchase. The offer lived only on the chapter wall, below Chapter I’s twenty levels, and on the unlit levels, which by design carry no padlock and no price. Settings, where a reviewer looks for a purchase, had only Restore.

So on 1 October the same Open Chapters II–IV button went into Settings, directly above Restore purchases, and the reply to App Review spelled out the path step by step. It is one view used in both places, so it looks and reads the same, and it disappears once you’ve bought.

Ratings and sharing

Tare asks for a rating only with Apple’s standard prompt, and only in two places: when you finish Chapter II and when you finish Chapter IV, and only if you’ve solved at least three levels in that session. That count lives in memory and is never saved. Finishing the free chapter never triggers it, so the prompt can’t appear anywhere near the purchase.

Settings also has a Share Tare row. It hands the system share sheet the plain App Store link and nothing else, with no campaign or referrer parameter, because in the plan’s words a shared link that reports who shared it is “analytics by another name”. The privacy policy lists what stays on your device.

Tare runs on iPhone and iPad with iOS or iPadOS 18 or later. The free chapter is also where the game teaches itself without a word, which designing a puzzle with no words walks through. To see how other models compare, the best logic puzzle games for iPhone sets Tare beside ad-supported and pay-once games, and the comparison pages cover Good Sudoku, Nonograms Katana and Simon Tatham’s Puzzles. Millrace, from the same studio, is a tile puzzle whose whole game is free, with no ads.