5 ways to save money on iPhone apps

With over 100,000 iPhone applications in the App Store, finding the right app can sometimes be a bewildering experience. Apple's getting better at refining the interface — it's certainly easier to find what you're looking for now than when the App Store first launched — but if you're on a limited budget or just love a good bargain, the App Store doesn't give you the tools you need if you're waiting for that $9.99 app to go on sale for $4.99.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to the App Store's built-in search engine that do let you know when iPhone apps go on sale, and they can save you tons of money. As of right now I have 74 third-party apps installed on my iPhone, and out of those, 34 of them are paid apps. Out of those 34 paid apps, I snagged 17 of them when they were temporarily available for free; almost every other paid app I've downloaded at a significant discount from the nominal, full price.

I've saved somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 on apps for my iPhone, and I got the opportunity to try out apps I might have ignored otherwise. It's all thanks to two websites and three iPhone apps that monitor App Store prices and let you know when apps go on sale. Read on to find out what they are and how they can save you buckets of cash.

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Websites:

First up is AppShopper.com. Not only does this site track popular changes in the App Store, you can also filter apps by paid vs. free, by category, and so forth. There's also a search field that allows you to search for any particular app. If you sign up for a free account on the site, you can also generate a Wish List of apps you'd like to buy — sort of a shopping cart for iPhone apps, a feature sorely missing from the App Store itself. AppShopper will notify you by e-mail when any of the apps on your Wish List drop in price. App Shopper also lets you tell it which apps you've already downloaded and gives you the option to receive an e-mail when updates to those apps become available.

App Shopper provides all the information for each individual app that the App Store provides, word-for-word, except for user reviews. Average star rating for the app is available, but the written user reviews for the apps are (perhaps mercifully) absent. It also shows all the available activity for the app, such as when it was introduced to the App Store, when it's been updated, and all the changes in price it's seen. So if you're looking at an app that's been in the App Store since August of '08 and has been in the Top 100 for its category since its introduction while never once seeing a price drop, that app probably isn't going to sell for less than full price any time soon. If the app started off slow and has seen several price fluctuations, that's one to keep an eye on.

148apps.com provides some of the same information that App Shopper provides, such as price drops (for the past five days) and newly introduced apps. While it doesn't provide as much trending information as App Shopper, 148Apps does offer a daily e-mail, an RSS feed, and a Twitter feed just for price drops. 148Apps also publishes its own reviews of iPhone apps, giving you another perspective on whether that app's worth your money before you buy it.

Free iPhone apps:

AppMiner [iTunes link] provides information on items brand new to the App Store, lists of top-rated apps, and lists of apps that are on sale. AppMiner also allows you to create a watch list of apps you want, and you can set a threshold for how low the price on the app has to go before AppMiner notifies you, anywhere from "any sale at all" all the way down to "free." Conveniently, AppMiner launches to the last window you viewed when the application was closed, so if all you're interested in is monitoring sale apps, you don't have to wait for another page to load first.

AppMiner used to be my primary means of monitoring sale-priced apps in the App Store, but unfortunately it's missing two features that I consider essential in an app of this type. First, AppMiner doesn't display user ratings for apps at all; the only way to find out user ratings is to look them up in the App Store itself. More importantly, AppMiner doesn't let you filter results — certain developers (who I won't mention by name, because I don't want to provide them with any publicity) love to spam the App Store with mountains of shovelware and constantly shift prices back and forth between $0.99 and free in order to draw more attention to their apps. This can mean that on some days the on-sale apps list on AppMiner is littered with heaps of useless apps, and it's very detrimental to the user experience.

PandoraBox [iTunes link] handily solves both of those issues. Not only does it display user ratings in the list views of featured, sale, and new apps, it also allows you to filter out spammy app developers by adding them to a block list. Like AppMiner, PandoraBox has a "shopping cart" of sorts called Favorites that lets you store apps you're interested in. However, AppMiner does have two advantages over PandoraBox: its notification by price feature for the Watch List (a feature missing in PandoraBox), and the ability to group both free and paid apps into one list; PandoraBox keeps lists segregated, meaning you have to scroll through two separate lists.

Between these two apps, most of my App Store monitoring on the iPhone is covered. I use AppMiner exclusively for the Watch List, and PandoraBox for everything else.

If you're not interested in new or featured apps and only want to hunt down the latest bargains, BargainBin [iTunes link] provides a much simpler and more streamlined interface than either AppMiner or PandoraBox. Like AppMiner, BargainBin lets you create watch lists for apps you want based on price drops, but it also lets you set up watch lists by category. BargainBin's biggest advantage as an app is its support for push notifications, so you'll know instantly when apps go on sale.

Bonus December-only savings:

As we said earlier, Appventcalendar.com is doing a December promo where they unveil a new, free game every day. So far all of the games unveiled there have been surprisingly fun, so at the very least you should keep tabs on their site through the next month.

With all these different sites and apps monitoring the App Store, there's far less need to worry about draining your checking account dry on iPhone apps. Even if you only try out one of the sites or apps, you'll save a lot of money in the long run.