Why Photo Vault Apps Charge Subscriptions (And Why Inner Gallery Doesn't)

You download a vault app. Import your private photos. Delete the originals from your camera roll. A month later, the app asks you to pay $9.99 to keep seeing them.

Your photos are now hostages.

The pattern

1. App offers a free trial or basic tier
2. You import your photos
3. Features get locked behind a subscription — sometimes including viewing your own photos at full resolution
4. You're paying rent to access your own files
5. Stop paying? Photos become inaccessible. Sometimes deleted.

This isn't hypothetical. This is how the top photo vault apps on the App Store actually work.

Keepsafe: $9.99/month according to the App Store. $120/year. Your photos are stored on their cloud infrastructure — pay monthly or lose access.

HiddenVault: $2.99/week per the App Store listing. $155/year. For what is essentially iCloud backup with a PIN screen.

Private Photo Vault: Roughly $40/year in subscriptions. A 0/100 score on JustUseApp — an automated NLP analysis of 981,000+ user reviews. Not a security audit, but a signal.

Why subscriptions don't make sense here

Subscriptions make sense when an app has real ongoing costs — servers, bandwidth, cloud storage. If Netflix or Spotify charged one-time, they'd go bankrupt.

But a photo vault that stores everything locally has no recurring costs. No server to maintain. No bandwidth bill. No cloud storage. The app runs on your phone, using your storage, your processor, your encryption hardware.

The marginal cost per user is close to zero. So why the subscriptions?

Two reasons:

1. Revenue. $10/month indefinitely generates far more than a one-time $15 purchase.
2. Lock-in. Once your photos are imported, the switching cost is enormous. Export everything, find a new app, reimport. Most people just keep paying.

What it actually costs over three years

| App | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Total |

|-----|--------|--------|--------|-------|

| Keepsafe | $120 | $120 | $120 | $360 |

| HiddenVault | $155 | $155 | $155 | $465 |

| Private Photo Vault | ~$40 | ~$40 | ~$40 | ~$120 |

| Inner Gallery Pro Bundle | €14.99 | €0 | €0 | €14.99 |

All prices from App Store listings as of early 2026. Keepsafe costs 24x more than Inner Gallery over three years — and stores your photos on their servers, meaning you're paying more for less privacy.

What happens when you stop paying

Search "Keepsafe lost my photos" on Reddit. Real posts from real users:

• May 2025 — "lost all the data without approval"
• March 2025 — factory reset, photos gone
• January 2025 — photos missing after device switch

When photos live on someone else's server, tied to an active subscription, you're one billing error away from losing everything.

With a one-time purchase, this entire scenario disappears. You paid. The app works. Done.

Why Inner Gallery uses one-time pricing

I'll be direct. Inner Gallery has no servers. The ongoing cost per user is my time — and I'm spending it anyway because I use the app daily.

No VCs pushing for recurring revenue. No growth team optimizing retention funnels. Just an app that does one thing and charges honestly for it.

Free tier: 2 spaces, 50 media. No countdown. No watermarks. No "premium trial."

Want more? Space Pack €4.99. Media Pack €4.99. Pro Bundle €14.99. Lifetime €99.99.

Pay once.

Subscriptions create perverse incentives

This is the part most pricing comparison articles miss. The subscription model creates business incentives that are directly opposed to privacy:

• Store data on servers → creates dependency and increases switching cost
• Make export hard → keeps users locked in
• Track behavior with analytics → optimize conversion and reduce churn (Keepsafe does this with Amplitude, per Amplitude's own case study)
• Send re-engagement notifications → pull back lapsed subscribers

Every one of those degrades privacy. The business model itself pushes the app toward practices that are bad for users.

A one-time purchase app has zero reason to do any of this. The sale already happened. The only incentive left is to make a good product.

Inner Gallery uses one-time purchases. Free tier: 2 spaces, 50 media, full encryption. Get it on the App Store.