The best photo cleaner app without a subscription
Most photo-cleaner apps on the App Store charge $4.99–$6.99 per week after a 'free' trial — over $250/year for an app you need a few hours a month. Sift takes the opposite bet: 60 swipes a day free forever, and unlimited cleaning for $14.99 once (or $1.99/month if you prefer). Pay once, clean forever.
The weekly-subscription trap
Cleaner apps are the poster child of subscription abuse: a hard paywall at launch, a 3-day trial, then a weekly charge you forget about. Cleaning your library is a burst activity — heavy for a week, then occasional. Weekly pricing is designed for exactly that forgetting.
What 'fair' looks like
- Free tier that's actually useful: 60 swipes a day clears ~1,800 photos a month without paying a cent — enough to maintain a clean library forever.
- A real one-time option: $14.99 lifetime is less than three weeks of the competition's pricing.
- Monthly if you want it: $1.99/month, cancel anytime — for a single big backlog blitz, that's one coffee.
Same job, no meter running
Feature-for-feature, Sift does what the subscription cleaners do — swipe deck, month grouping, filters for screenshots and videos, a safety bin, storage stats — plus things they skip, like full on-device privacy (no account, no upload, no ads). The difference is the receipt.
Do it in minutes with SiftSwipe left to toss, right to keep. Free — 60 swipes a day, photos never leave your iPhone.
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