Quiz Duel (MAG Interactive) did this. Partner wanted to play all the time. I discovered the videos ads were using up all of my prepaid data before the end of e

Quiz Duel (MAG Interactive) did this. Partner wanted to play all the time. I discovered the videos ads were using up all of my prepaid data before the end of each month. I bought the premium version, which was a one-time purchase "back then". They launched an app revision that had a handful of very noticeable bugs. Then they changed to a new app (rather than upgrade), pushed all the users to the new app, and made the ad-free version a subscription. What do you get for your monthly payment? Well, nothing significant, like you'd expect from a subscription. In fact, they essentially crowd-sourced their Q&A content by letting users submit feedback when a pair was inaccurate, so users are fixing problems in the content for free. Server usage? Not to minimize the daily work of countless devs, but a quiz game is essentially a handful of databases, a dollop of quite straightforward logic, some static UI visuals, and then content scraping to fill the main Q&A database. The logic and UI visuals almost never need a rewrite. DynamoDB is pennies per month per user, and if you're a real POS you can use long advertisements to push away users temporarily when your RCUs/WCUs are getting close to a scale-up threshold, which has the nice side effect of increasing revenue if everyone watches the long adverts anyway. I guess they expected a percentage of users to bail switching to subscription, and that doesn't cost them a cent. You said it best: shady