Free vs Pro

Live streaming is free. There is no paywall between opening the app and seeing your edit on the phone: you install the plugin, pair the phone, and the picture arrives. The subscription changes how good that picture is — how sharp, how loud, how far you can punch in, and which overlays you can draw on top of it.

Nothing about the free tier is time-limited, session-limited, or nagged into uselessness. It is a smaller version of the same instrument.

The entitlement matrix

Everything not in that table is the same on both tiers. Codec, GOP Mode, Encoder Engine, Audio Sync, chrome behavior, the stats HUD, transport control and the offline clip monitor are all ungated.

What each gate means in practice

Resolution Limit — 360p short side

The Resolution Limit chip offers nine rungs. On the free tier, every rung above 360p — including Source — shows a lock and opens the upgrade sheet instead of selecting. The rungs at or below the cap (360p, 240p) are freely selectable.

"Short side" means the smaller of the two encoded dimensions, so a 16:9 sequence streams at roughly 640×360 and a 9:16 vertical sequence at roughly 360×640.

This is the one gate that is also enforced on the host. The app sends its tier to the plugin as a one-byte control message (opcode 0x41), and the plugin clamps every resolution request against its own copy of the free-tier ceiling before configuring the encoder. A modified client asking for Source gets 360p anyway. It also means the clamp survives the app and the plugin disagreeing: when the entitlement changes mid-session, the app sends the new tier before the new rung, so the first uncapped request is not rejected by a stale flag.

Audio — 10-second samples

On the free tier the stream starts muted, and the speaker button in the HUD does not unmute — it plays a 10-second sample and then goes quiet again. There is no per-session quota; you can start another sample immediately. When a sample finishes, the upgrade sheet appears.

The plugin streams the same PCM either way. The gate is entirely on the phone.

Pinch-zoom ceiling — 4×

Max zoom in the settings panel is a slider with fixed stops at 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30×. The free tier lands on 2×/3×/4× and the rest of the track is drawn but dimmed; tapping the dimmed part opens the upgrade sheet. The same ceiling applies inside Preview from Photos or Files, which reads the same setting.

Layouts

Standard, Full Screen, Universal Safe Zone and the three Shorts variants (LTR (default), RTL, Both) are free. The three TikTok variants and the three Reels variants are Pro; their rows show a lock in the layout picker.

Safe-zone color and opacity

The Universal Safe Zone overlay is free to select, but on the free tier its color is pinned to red and its opacity to 30%. The opacity slider stays visible and readable — it is simply inert, and a tap on it opens the upgrade sheet. Of the five color swatches (red, black, white, green, blue), only red is selectable.

Products and prices

Prices are US App Store prices and are always rendered in the app from the live store catalog, never hardcoded — so your local currency and any regional price tier is what you actually see.

Monthly and Yearly live in one App Store subscription group, so switching between them is an upgrade or downgrade rather than a second subscription. Lifetime is a non-consumable outside that group.

Two discounted plans — a cheaper yearly and a cheaper monthly — exist behind the Not now, thanks link on the upgrade sheet, which swaps it to a one-time-offer page. They sit in the same subscription group and share the same trial clock. If those products are not available in your storefront, the offer entry point is simply not shown.

The prices on the cards are read from the App Store at runtime, so they show your storefront's currency; View all plans reveals the Lifetime card below these two.

The 7-day free trial

The trial is an Apple introductory offer attached to the yearly plan only. Monthly carries no trial.

• It is granted once per Apple ID per subscription group. Deleting and reinstalling the app does not re-arm it, and neither does cancelling and resubscribing.
• The app asks the App Store whether your Apple ID is still eligible before it shows any trial wording. If you are not eligible, the call to action reads Continue and the price line shows the plain yearly price, rather than promising a free week you cannot have.
• If you are eligible and the yearly card is selected, the button reads Start My 7-Day Free Trial and the price line reads "Free for 7 days, then billed $49.99 yearly".
• Apple owns the clock, the billing, the renewal and the cancellation. During the trial the app is fully unlocked and behaves exactly like a paid subscription — the app never distinguishes "trial" from "paid" for access purposes, only for wording.

Lifetime

Lifetime is a one-time non-consumable purchase. It outranks every subscription state: if you own it, you have Pro regardless of what any subscription is doing.

Apple does not cancel a running subscription when you buy Lifetime. If you had one, it keeps renewing until you stop it. The app detects that case and the home screen's footer link changes from Manage Subscription to Cancel Subscription, which opens Apple's own manage-subscriptions sheet.

Restore and redeem

Both live in the footer of the upgrade sheet, alongside Terms and Privacy.

There is no account and no login. Entitlement is resolved entirely on-device from the Apple ID already signed in — the app has no server, no receipt backend, and never sees your Apple ID.

What happens when a subscription lapses

The stream is not cut. You drop to the free tier, and the settings that the free tier cannot hold are clamped back into range:

The clamp runs on connect and on every entitlement change, and it applies to the value on the wire as well as the one in the picker — so a rung chosen during a trial cannot outlive the trial.

Going the other way, buying or restoring Pro mid-session promotes the picture rather than leaving it where the free tier pinned it. A rung at or below 360p moves to Pro's shipped default of 720p, and a zoom ceiling at or below 4× moves to 10×. A Pro user who had deliberately chosen, say, 540p or 20× is left alone.

Related

• Encoding settings — where Resolution Limit lives
• Audio — the sample flow in detail
• Layouts — which overlays are which
• Settings reference — every setting, with its gate
• Privacy and data