SUBTL (iPhone): AI captions that understand Hinglish, Tanglish and other mixed Indian speech, with word-level timing and 21 styles. Forever-free tier, no card

What it is
SUBTL is an iPhone app that captions short videos where the speaker mixes an Indian language with English, which is how most of us actually talk. "humara favourite dosa" comes out exactly like that, not as English soup or as Tamil script for words you said in English. Every word is timed to the audio, there are 21 caption styles, and you tap any word to fix it. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi and Punjabi all work the same way. Live on the App Store since the end of August.

SUBTL - AI captions

Numbers at day five

• 55 sign-ins
• 17 people have exported at least one finished video
• 58 exports total, and one person in Jaipur did 24 of them
• Revenue: ₹0. The only Pro subscriber is me.
• Traffic: App Store search, my own network, one Instagram post. Nothing paid.

The India-specific decisions

1. Pricing in rupees, at ₹29 149/month with introductory offer. I looked at what people here already pay for: a Spotify plan, a Hotstar plan. Anything with a dollar sign would have died at the paywall. The free tier is 5 clean exports in the first month, then 5 a month with a small watermark, so people finish a real video before I ask for money.
2. Apple as the payment rail, not Razorpay. Apple's rules force in-app purchases through them, which costs 15% under the Small Business Program. The upside nobody mentions: Apple is the merchant of record, so GST invoicing to customers, refunds and chargebacks are their problem, not mine. For a solo dev that trade was worth it. When Android ships in two weeks the same question comes up with Google Play, and I would love to hear from anyone who has run both.
3. iPhone first in an Android country. I know. I did it because I could ship faster alone, and because iPhone users in India are disproportionately the people who post reels for a living. Android is two weeks out.
4. Getting captions to look good on a reel was harder than the captioning. Most fonts that ship on phones fall apart at Reels sizes, and the good Indic faces need licences. Budget for that if you build anything with regional-language UI.

The mistake
People started making second accounts to reset the free quota within the first week. I had tied the quota to the account instead of the device. If you launch a free tier, decide on day one what it is keyed to, because changing it after launch means a backend change plus an app update.

What I would like from this sub

• Anyone selling a consumer subscription in India: what free-to-paid conversion did you see, and at what point did paid acquisition start to make sense?
• Reddit is not where Indian creators live. Instagram is. If you have cracked creator distribution in India without an ad budget, I am listening.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/subtl-ai-captions/id6787676093
Site: https://subtl.cc/

Happy to answer anything about App Review from India, StoreKit, or the captioning UX.