Understand in-app product types and catalogue considerations

If you're a merchant developer, you can use Play Console to offer users digital products, which we call in-app products. This article describes different in-app product types, product configuration (such as eligibility and limitations) and other considerations depending on the product type that you offer.

In-app product types

In-app products fall into two main categories: one-time and subscription products.

• One-time products: A one-time product can be purchased with a single charge to the user's payment method. Examples include: Additional game levels, premium loot boxes and media content. These are identified using the INAPP product type in the Google Play Billing Library. One-time products are either consumable or non-consumable:
  • Consumable product: A consumable product is one that a user consumes to receive in-app content. Consumable products can be bought more than once on Google Play. You dispense the associated benefits or effects in a process that's sometimes known as provisioning, and then consume the purchase of the product so that it can be bought again if desired. For example, a user might purchase an in-game currency product such as a stack of coins. When the user completes the payment, your app then dispenses a fixed number of coins to the user, and then consumes the product purchase, so that the purchased stack of coins product is available again for the user to buy more if they want.
  • Non-consumable product: A non-consumable product is purchased once and provides a permanent benefit. Once purchased, these products are permanently associated with the user's Google Account. Examples of non-consumable products include premium upgrades and level packs.
• Subscription products: A subscription is a set of benefits users can access during a specified period. You can offer multiple subscriptions within the same app, either to represent entirely different benefits (for example, a streaming video app could have separate 'news' and 'sports' subscriptions) or different levels of service (for example, a cloud storage app could have 100 GB, 1 TB and 10 TB subscriptions). These are identified using the SUBS product type in the Google Play Billing Library.
  • Subscriptions contain one or more base plans. A base plan specifies the set of attributes for a given billing period and the renewal type of a subscription plan. You can specify whether a base plan is auto-renewing or prepaid (non-renewing). Eligible users can purchase an offer to obtain access with a trial and/or introductory price. Offers are available only to users who meet the eligibility criteria that you define.
  • Users gain access (or entitlement) to a subscription by purchasing a base plan or offer, either in your app or on Google Play.

General catalogue size and configuration considerations

Each app has a default limit of 1,000 in-app products in total, with additional considerations depending on the type of product (subscriptions or one-time).

Note: Deleted products do not count towards the 1,000 limit even though you can not reuse their product IDs.

Subscription product catalogue size and configuration considerations

• There is a limit of 50 active base plans and offers at a given time for each subscription product.
• There is a limit of 250 active and inactive base plans and offers for each subscription product. This means that you can have inactive base plans and offers set up in your subscriptions to switch and rotate as needed that don't count towards the limit of 50 mentioned above (for example, seasonal offers, special flash deals and so on).
• Subscription base plans and offers support tags, which enable convenient identification from your app or backend logic without relying on a specific offer ID. You can incorporate tags in your catalogue management logic to label specific Google Play products to concepts and categories relevant to your business logic. For example, you may tag a loyalty programme-related offer with a distinctive tag that refers to the programme.
• Subscription base plans and offers support regional availability and pricing.
• Offers support eligibility criteria that can be managed by Google Play or determined by your app at runtime. You can use offers for promotions such as free trials and introductory prices for auto-renewing subscriptions.
• Prepaid plans don't currently support offers, though you can create multiple prepaid base plans to support promotional pricing, and then in your app, evaluate whatever criteria you define to determine if the user is eligible for a promotional price.
• Subscription products can only be deleted if they never had a base plan published. We recommend leveraging base plans and offers instead of creating additional subscriptions when possible for the following reasons:
  • It will help keep your catalogue manageable and avoid duplicated products with the same name, description and benefits.
  • It will prevent users from purchasing redundant subscription plans, by handling plan changes automatically for base plans within the same subscription. For example, if a user owns a monthly plan for a subscription and purchases the annual plan for the same product, the system will automatically handle that as a replacement.
  • It will simplify the in-app logic needed to obtain all the different ways a user can buy each set of benefits.
  • It will simplify price-change management, as base plans contain your subscriptions' pricing cohorts.
• If all the options to sell your subscription products can't be perfectly reflected in the base plan and offers model and you need to use more than one subscription per set of benefits, then you can make adjustments based on your needs. For example, you may need to keep a set of backward-compatible products to support older versions of your app. In this case, you will have to handle the additional logic to manage the duplication.

One-time product catalogue size and configuration considerations

• One-time products don't currently support offers or regional availability. For one-time products, you may need to configure a product for each price point.
• One-time products can be deleted. You should avoid unnecessary product duplication and make sure that you deprecate legacy products that you don't need any more in your catalogue as much as possible to prevent bloating it with unused products that could make certain processes unnecessarily slow. Ensure that your catalogue publishing integration is aware of the above limits to minimise errors.

Google Play's billing system has a limit on the price range that you can set for subscription and one-time products depending on the location.

Related content

• Learn how to create an in-app product.
• Better understand subscriptions and learn how to create and manage subscriptions in Play Console.