How Much Does ASO Cost for an Indie App?

Short answer

ASO can cost an indie app $0 beyond Apple’s $99 yearly developer membership, plus your time. Tools start around $90 a year if you want to pay, and they mainly buy convenience. The costs that grow fast are agencies and paid ads, and neither is required to do the basics well.

OpenASO is free and publishes this guide, so it benefits if you pick the free route. Prices are list prices from each vendor’s site, checked November 1, 2026, and we give no “typical budget”, because we have no data for one.

What are the costs?

Apple’s Developer Program costs 99 USD a year. You pay that to ship at all, so it isn’t really an ASO cost.

What do keyword tools cost?

Keyword tools range from free to thousands of dollars a year, and an indie iOS developer only needs the low end.

For a fuller view, see the ASO tool comparison and Astro alternatives.

Do you have to pay for Apple Ads to get popularity data?

You do not have to spend on ads to read popularity data. Apple’s search popularity score appears inside Apple Ads. To read it through OpenASO, your account must be fully set up, including payment or tax information, and it must have access to one of your apps. OpenASO only reads the score, without creating campaigns or charging your card.

Running ads is a separate decision, with no fixed cost, because you set the budget. Are Apple Ads worth it? covers that.

What do screenshots and localization cost?

Both can cost nothing but time, and paid tools mainly speed them up.

Apple requires at least one screenshot and allows up to 10 per device size, so you can start small. AppScreens has a free plan with 1 app, 1 saved project, and 5 screens per project, but no localization or store upload. ASO Atlas’s Screenshot Studio is free with starter templates, and an account unlocks watermark-free exports. Freelance design prices are rarely published, so get a quote.

Apple’s localization reference lists 50 languages and locales and mentions no fee for adding them. The cost is translation and review. DeepL’s free web translator allows 50,000 characters per user a month, which is a lot for short metadata. A machine translation still needs a human check and local keyword research, so add languages one at a time. Which languages to add first helps you choose.

What do agencies cost?

Agency pricing is mostly private, and it is hard to justify for one small app. A few reference points:

• ASOitis, which sells ASO services, lists its own audit at $99, and monthly plans at $499 and $999.
• The same article, with prices checked October 1, 2026, puts audits at agencies that publish prices at about $999 to €2,500, and retainers from about €2,900 a month per market. Treat this as one vendor’s survey.
• Admiral Media says its fee comes in a written proposal after a call, and its retainers start with a 6-month term.

At those retainer levels, one month can exceed years of tool costs. Ask what you would get that a weekend of your own work would not.

What is your time worth?

Your time is the largest real cost, and it is what a paid tool should reduce. The sum is simple: a tool pays for itself when it saves more hours than its price divided by your hourly value.

Here is a made-up example. If you value your time at $30 an hour, a $108 yearly tool needs to save 3.6 hours a year. That is easy to meet if you check rankings often, and hard to meet if you ship metadata changes twice a year. The rate is only an illustration, so use your own.

What does a $0 ASO setup look like?

This path uses Apple’s free tools and OpenASO’s free tools:

1. Clean up your metadata. Build your 100 characters with the keyword field builder, and check limits with the metadata checker.
2. See who holds your terms. The keyword rank checker shows the top apps by country, with no account.
3. Get popularity scores. Set up Apple Ads as described above, then compare candidates.
4. Track rankings. On a Mac, OpenASO keeps a daily history. Without a Mac, Applyra’s free plan allows 5 keywords, or check by hand.
5. Read your funnel. App Analytics shows downloads by source and conversion rate for your apps.
6. Test your page. Product page optimization in App Store Connect compares up to three treatments of your icon, screenshots, or preview video against your original.

The free ASO tools guide lists more options.

When should you start paying?

Pay when a free setup blocks something real. OpenASO has no Google Play support, no Windows version, no web dashboard for a team, and no download or revenue estimates. It also doesn’t publish to App Store Connect or generate screenshots. If you need any of those, a paid tool is a fair purchase.

Next, run the $0 path for one release cycle, and note where you got stuck. That list tells you what, if anything, is worth buying.