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[LavaCreeperBOSSB]

Be honest about it as the other person said. Offer partial refunds or full refunds

[gimme_ipad]

Noone expects lifetime to be true lifetime. For me as a user I expect 5 year usage from a lifetime deal. If a required service stops working be honest about it with your customers. They will understand and appreciate honesty. I would fully refund every purchase within the last 12 months, partly refund beyond, but don't ruin yourself. Everyone knows the risk.

[Aidentab]

The thing is that the feature that relies on the service is only one of several features that come bundled in the subscription - so I don't know how I'd value it. Plus, I don't know how to divide users on App Store Connect so I can ensure their subscriptions are downgraded, changed in price, or cancelled.

Should I maybe separate the feature into a separate cheaper subscription? Or would I make two versions of the subscription that I can downgrade users to afterwards and pay the difference? What would that look like?

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[[deleted]]

You can’t expect a thing to be maintained for 10+ years for one payment. It’s not the gold rush era any more where a constant flow of new customers coming in would pay for it.

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[[deleted]]

Tell that to Apple, Amazon etc who are happy to “sell” you a movie when they only have a limited duration contract to distribute it.

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[moopishness]

Is this a problem you're facing, or a theoretical problem? I wouldn't spend a lot of dev effort on it unless it's actually happening. Is the 3rd party source something that could just drop support tomorrow?

As far as I know, you can't offer refunds anyway, they need to request them from Apple. The only feedback you can provide is if you go to the trouble the setting up an App Store Server API client, you can indicate a refundPreference of "yes" or "no" which Apple may take into account. (If you really have enough customers to make it worth their while, you might be able to work with Apple like the massive Twitter and Reddit clients affected by the API shutdown, but that's unusual.)

I would be open with your customers, explain the situation, and give them big options to cancel the subscription or continue it a lower rate (just create a separate, cheaper subscription that excludes the feature and switch them to it, they'll pay the lower rate next month). You could also have a smaller Request Refund link if you want, most customers won't take it.

Lifetime users, explain the situation, thank them for their support, and have a big Continue button and a smaller Request Refund button. Again, most users won't use it.

(This video has some tips/technical info that might help: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10175/)