Is Wick a One-Time Purchase or a Subscription? | Wick

The short answer

Wick's focus ritual is free in full — lighting a candle, running Pomodoro, Flowtime or a plain timer, naming your daily intention, the standard Shield, your almanac and your streak. Wick Pro is a single one-time purchase: no subscription, no auto-renewal, no trial that quietly converts. It adds deep-guard mode, candle skins, ambient sounds and more themes.

If you would rather not read the pricing arguments first, it is on the App Store and the rest of this page is about what the free tier really covers, how the purchase is restored, and where the one-time model is genuinely worse for you.

Why the searcher is here

Focus apps churn, and the reason is rarely that the timer was bad. It is the billing. A tool you use every day, priced as a monthly service, registers as a small loss every month — and a focus app is specifically the kind of tool you will use badly for a week and not at all for a month. The subscription keeps charging exactly when you have stopped showing up, so you cancel, and then a habit you were building disappears over a billing decision.

The second, quieter reason is subscription amnesia: a lapsed subscription can gate away data you already generated — your history, your streak, your almanac — unless you pay again. For a tool that counts what you actually did, that is the worst possible design.

Wick's answer is that the ownership question is decided once. There is no renewal to cancel, and the free tier does not degrade into an upsell. That is a deliberate choice rather than a launch promotion, and the rest of this page is what that choice does and does not buy you.

What the free tier actually covers

Its own FAQ puts the free app as covering the entire loop: lighting a candle, Pomodoro / Flowtime / timer sessions, daily intentions, the standard Shield, your almanac, and streaks. You can focus fully every day without ever paying. That is worth stating plainly because the usual pricing pattern in this category is the opposite — the pomodoro that is "free" only counts interruptions, or the history that is "free" until you want to look at last month.

Pro adds exactly four things:

• Deep-guard mode. The Shield has three strengths. Gentle · one breath — free — makes you pause five seconds before a distracting app opens. Shield · mute & hide — free — hides the apps and mutes their notifications while you focus. Deep · no early release is the Wick Pro mode: once lit, it is locked to the end of the session, and Wick describes it as being for the moments you always break your own rules. It is opt-in, not the default.
• Candle skins — different candles in the room.
• Ambient focus sounds.
• Additional themes.

So one of the four unlocks changes how the app behaves, and three are about how the ritual looks and sounds. If you are on the fence, that is the decision: the free modes already have teeth (a five-second pause before a distracting app opens is the nudge with evidence behind it), and Deep is for the sessions where you know you will not hold the line yourself.

How the purchase and the restore actually work

Wick Pro is a single one-time purchase — a non-consumable App Store product, billed by Apple through your Apple ID. There is no recurring charge and nothing to cancel; if you never buy it, you never see a bill.

Restoring is one button: on the Pro screen, tap Restore. It re-checks your Apple ID and re-activates the purchase — useful after reinstalling or switching devices. Because the purchase is tied to your Apple ID rather than to a Wick account, no account or password is involved. Wick resolves its entitlement state on launch and refreshes it, which is why a restore on a new phone takes effect without signing in to anything.

This is the practical reason the no-account stance and the no-subscription stance are the same stance. Wick keeps your intentions, focus history, streaks and settings on your device and never uploads them; your purchase record lives in Apple's store, tied to your Apple ID. No receipt of its own is kept anywhere else that you could lose.

What a one-time model means for the free tier over time

A subscription is usually justified by ongoing server cost. Wick has no server: everything runs on your device, and the Shield is enforced on-device by iOS through Apple's Screen Time (Family Controls) framework — Wick never sees which specific apps you chose beyond applying your own rule. There is no per-user hosting bill to fund, and no reason for a feature to go behind a recurring charge later.

The community-side version of the same point: Apple's own review guidelines reject subscription mechanics for stand-alone utilities, and a one-time product is the only shape that satisfies them. Either way the result is the same — buying once is the end of the transaction.

The honest limits

Where the one-time model is worse, and where Wick's Pro is genuinely less than you might assume:

• Deep mode is a real paywall, not a free trial of it. Without Pro, the strictest Shield you can light is Shield (mute & hide). Gentle and Shield are genuinely useful — Deep is the only mode that removes your own early exit.
• The Shield needs a real device and your authorisation. The app uses Apple's Screen Time framework, which iOS will not grant silently; on the simulator it does not function at all.
• Deleting the app deletes your data. There is no account and no iCloud sync to restore it from; your intentions, history and streak live only on your device. Reinstall and restore the Pro purchase from your Apple ID, but the history is gone.
• The price is not published anywhere. The amount shown in the App Store listing is the price.
• There is no team, student or multi-year plan. Billing is Apple's, and there is only one product, so there is no discount to negotiate and nothing that expires.

What Wick does differently

Wick (product page) is a candlelight focus timer on iOS 17+, and the pricing is a consequence of the design rather than a marketing layer on top of it:

• The whole ritual is free — timer styles, daily intention, Shield, almanac, streak — and the Pro purchase is a one-time unlock of Deep mode, candle skins, ambient sounds and themes.
• No account, no sign-up, no tracking. No analytics of your focus sessions, no access to photos or contacts.
• The Shield is enforced by iOS itself, on-device, through Family Controls — so the guard works without the app knowing your list.
• Widgets, Live Activity and watchOS are not paywalled. A Home Screen and Lock Screen widget, a focus Live Activity, and a watchOS app for wrist-based focus and session mirroring — starting a session from the wrist rather than unlocking the phone fits the ritual.
• Honest limits: Deep mode does not work on the simulator; the purchase is tied to one Apple ID; the price is whatever the App Store listing says; and the product is iPhone-only today.

The decision you can make now

You can use Wick fully without paying anything — the free Shield and the almanac are the whole app, and the free tier is not a trial. If you want the one remaining behavioural upgrade, Deep · no early release, plus candle skins, ambient sounds and themes, Pro is a single purchase through Apple with no renewal. Nothing about your habit lapses when you stop paying, because you never start.

Download Wick on the App Store, or read the Shield FAQ for how the modes behave. Support questions go to [email protected] with your device model and iOS version, and replies usually take one to two business days.