There is no list price. Here is what you actually pay, and how to tell whether it is too much.
Apple Search Ads charges you per tap, not per impression. Nobody seeing your ad costs you anything; somebody tapping it does. You set the most you are willing to pay for a tap, and an auction decides what you actually pay, which is usually less.
So "how much does it cost" has no published answer, and anyone quoting you an average is quoting a number from somebody else's app in somebody else's market. What a tap costs depends on the term, the storefront, and who else is bidding on it that week. The same keyword can cost several times more in the United States than in Brazil.
The useful question is not "what does a tap cost" but "what is an install worth to me". Once you know that, the tap price answers itself.
Work it out in this order:
A worked version: if an install is worth €4 to you and a quarter of taps become installs, a tap is worth €1 at break-even. Bidding €1 means running at cost. Bidding €0.60 means keeping the difference.
A daily budget is not simply "how fast you spend". It decides whether you learn anything at all.
A keyword needs roughly fifty taps before its conversion rate means anything — below that you are reading noise, and a term that has had eight taps and no installs has told you nothing. Apple's own guidance points at the same range. Spread over a fortnight, that gives you a floor:
| What you are funding | Arithmetic |
|---|---|
| Taps needed to judge one keyword | about 50 |
| Over a learning window of | about 14 days |
| So a campaign’s daily appetite is | keywords × 50 × cost per tap ÷ 14 |
Ten keywords at €0.50 a tap is about €18 a day to give every one of them a readable answer inside two weeks. Half that budget does not buy a slower answer — it buys no answer, because you pay for the expensive early part of the learning curve and never reach the part that tells you something.
This is also why a small budget should run a simple structure. Published guidance puts the threshold at around a thousand dollars a month before a complicated account is worth building; below that, four campaigns each get a quarter of too little.
Apple does not charge a platform fee, a minimum spend, or a setup cost. What you commit to is the daily budget on each campaign — and that is worth saying precisely, because Apple has no account-level or app-level cap. The sum of your campaign daily budgets is your daily exposure. Four campaigns at €50 is €200 a day, not €50.
The other cost is your time, which is the one people forget. Campaigns do not hold still: terms that worked stop working, costs drift, and a keyword that has quietly spent €40 without an install will keep doing it until somebody looks.
Apple does not set one beyond a daily budget of one unit of your account currency. A practical floor is different: a keyword needs around fifty taps before its conversion rate can be read, so a budget that cannot reach that inside a couple of weeks pays for the expensive part of learning and never reaches the useful part.
No. Apple Search Ads is cost-per-tap. Impressions are free; you are charged when somebody taps the ad.
The one that is below what a tap is worth to you. That is your break-even cost per install multiplied by the share of taps that become installs. A tap price that is cheap for one app is ruinous for another, because the two apps make different amounts of money per user.
Different storefronts have different competition and different amounts of search traffic. The same term can cost several times more in one market than another, which is why a budget spread evenly across countries usually buys very little in each.