What to check before you pay

Everything in this list is establishable in about fifteen minutes, from documents the app already publishes, without reading a single review or comparison. All six get harder to act on once you have paid and once there is a conversation history you would rather not lose. That asymmetry is the only reason to do it in advance.

The money questions, which are the easy ones

Find the renewal price, not the offer price. Introductory pricing and renewal pricing are frequently different figures, and the renewal one is the one you are agreeing to. It is disclosed at purchase, and it is also in the app store’s in-app purchase list, which is generated from billing configuration rather than written as a pitch and therefore lists every price point the app sells.

Establish what the tier adds, in units. A plan that says “enhanced memory” and “priority responses” has told you nothing comparable. A plan that says a number of messages, a length of history, a count of characters, has. If the difference between tiers is only expressible in adjectives, you cannot evaluate it, and that is especially true of memory.

Find the cancellation route before you need it. Specifically: is this billed by the app store or by the operator’s own site. That single fact determines where cancellation happens, and getting it wrong is the most common way people end up paying for something they thought they had stopped. Cancelling is narrower than it sounds in several other ways too.

The two documents, and the four searches

The privacy policy and the terms of service are the only sources here that are neither marketing nor guesswork. Nobody reads them end to end. You do not have to; you have to search them.

In the privacy policy, search for four words. Retention tells you how long messages are kept, and whether the answer is a period or a discretion. Train tells you whether conversations feed model development, and silence on the point is itself an answer, because a policy that does not promise anything has not promised anything. Third — as in third parties, or service providers — tells you how many companies hold the text, which is normally more than one because most apps do not run their own model. Delete tells you what deletion covers and what persists afterwards.

In the terms, search for two. Modify or amend finds the clause permitting the operator to change the terms, the features and the pricing, which is what makes every other commitment provisional. Terminate finds the conditions under which the account can be closed by them, and what happens to unused paid time when it is. Four clauses in the terms do most of the work.

That is six searches in two documents. It is genuinely fifteen minutes and it is the highest-information activity available on this entire subject.

THE PRODUCT — the pre-purchase check

  · The price on the upgrade screen
                    → an offer price. The renewal price is a
                      separate figure, disclosed smaller.

  · "Enhanced" anything
                    → not a unit. Only units compare between
                      tiers.

  · Where you cancel
                    → wherever you bought it. Store-billed
                      and site-billed have different routes.

  · Retention, training use, third parties,
    deletion
                    → CHECK THE POLICY. Four searches, and
                      silence counts as an answer.

  · All of it — price, tiers, memory length,
    filters, retention
                    → THE OPERATOR DECIDES, and reserves the
                      right to amend. What you check today is
                      today's version.

  · Whether an export exists
                    → VARIES BY APP. It is the only part of
                      the arrangement you control.

The exit, checked at the entrance

The sixth item is the one nobody checks and the only one that cannot be obtained later.

Does a data export exist, and what does it contain. If there is an export function, use it once early, while you have nothing invested, and look at the file. It tells you whether you can keep your own copy of a conversation, and what an export includes is often narrower than the conversation. If there is no export, that is worth knowing on day one rather than on the day an email announces a shutdown.

The reason this belongs in a pre-purchase list rather than a housekeeping list is that every other item above concerns things the operator controls. The export is the only item that concerns something you can hold.

What you can do in fifteen minutes

Open the app store listing and read the in-app purchase list and the data disclosure section. Open the privacy policy and run four searches. Open the terms and run two. Find the cancellation route for your billing channel. Trigger an export if one exists. Then decide, away from the upgrade screen — because the upgrade screen appears at a moment chosen for its conversion rate, and a decision taken elsewhere is simply a decision taken under your own conditions.

What this doesn’t tell you

It does not tell you which app to use. No recommendation is being made here about any product, and none will be.

It does not tell you whether a policy is honoured. Everything above reads wording, and wording is a commitment rather than a behaviour.

And it does not tell you whether the thing will be good, which is not knowable from documents and is not what this list is for. The list establishes the terms of the arrangement, and the terms are the part that is much easier to examine before you are invested in it than after.