Subscription or pay once?
A vault app that holds your photos on its servers has a bill every month. One that holds nothing does not. That single fact explains most of the pricing in this category.
Paying once vs a subscription
AlterVault
KeepsafeUS list prices, September 2026.
When a subscription is fair
If an app stores your photos in the cloud, the developer pays for that storage every month, for as long as the photos are there, whether or not you ever open the app again. Plus bandwidth, plus servers, plus someone on call. Those costs recur, so a recurring price is not a trick.
An app that stores nothing has no monthly cost to pass on.
The honest risk of paying once
A subscription only gets paid if you stay. A one-time purchase has already been paid, so nothing funds next year's OS update.
The question is what happens to your photos if the developer disappears.
AlterVault exports at full quality any time, and the whole library writes to one encrypted backup file you keep.
Five minutes of checking before you pay
- Is there a real free tier?
- Not a trial that expires. A working version with a cap, so you can import, view, export and back up before any money moves.
- Can you export at full resolution?
- Some apps compress on import and hand back something smaller. Test with one large photo and compare file sizes.
- Is there a backup you control?
- A local vault with no export path is a library held hostage by one device and one app version.
- Does the paid tier gate the safety features?
- Caps on volume are reasonable. Caps on getting your own data out are not.
- Does buying require an account?
- Apple and Google verify purchases without the app knowing who you are. An app demanding an email to unlock a local feature has added a database it did not need.