Guide
A photo cleanup app with no subscription
Most apps in this category bill weekly, monthly, or yearly. Cleanup Today doesn't have a subscription tier at all, not even as an option.
What Cleanup Today actually costs
Seven days free, then a single $4.99 purchase. That's the whole pricing page. No weekly or annual plan, no account to create, and nothing billed automatically if you decide not to buy. Your purchase is tied to your Apple ID and covers every device you own.
- No subscription, ever
- No account required
- Nothing leaves your device
- One $4.99 purchase, done
Why this category defaults to subscriptions
Subscriptions are usually a business decision, not a technical one: recurring revenue is predictable, and it keeps growing instead of stopping after one payment. Apple's StoreKit fully supports auto-renewable subscriptions without a developer needing any servers or accounts at all, so "we'd need a backend to bill you" isn't really why most apps default to it. Cleanup Today skips the subscription for the same reason it skips accounts and servers: once you've paid, there's nothing left running in the background, and nothing to remember to cancel.
How other photo cleanup apps price it
Swipewipe offers weekly subscription tiers alongside an annual option. CleanMyPhone, from MacPaw, is subscription-based, billed monthly or yearly. Slidebox offers weekly, monthly, and yearly subscriptions, plus a pricier one-time unlock for people who'd rather not subscribe at all. Timehop, the closest comparison on the memories side rather than cleanup, runs on a freemium subscription (Timehop+).
Exact prices shift often enough that we'd rather not print numbers here that go stale, check each app's current App Store listing if you want to compare directly. The pattern that doesn't change is the model: subscription is the default, and a true one-time purchase with no subscription option at all is rare.
Looking for an alternative to one of these?
If you've looked at Swipewipe, CleanMyPhone, or Slidebox and the recurring billing was the part that gave you pause, Cleanup Today covers the same cleanup job, finding and clearing duplicates and screenshots, without asking you to subscribe. Timehop is a different kind of app, pulling memories from your social accounts rather than cleaning up your camera roll, but if what you wanted was the daily "photos from this day" habit without a subscription, that's part of what Cleanup Today adds on top.