A clear breakdown of what Planner for iPad costs — and how it compares to what you’d spend on other iPad planning setups.
Let’s skip the marketing language and get straight to the numbers.
Planner for iPad is free to download and free to use. You can open the app today, sync your Apple Calendar, write with your Apple Pencil, and plan your week without spending anything. No trial period. No countdown. No “7 days until we lock your features.”
But there are two premium tiers that unlock additional capabilities — and whether they’re worth it depends on how you plan. This article explains exactly what each tier includes, what stays free, and how the total cost compares to other popular ways of planning on iPad.
What’s Free
The free version of Planner for iPad isn’t a stripped-down demo. It’s a fully functional planner. Here’s what you get at no cost:
You get Apple Calendar sync — the app reads your existing calendar events and displays them directly in your planner, so you can see your schedule and write around it with Apple Pencil. You get daily, weekly, and monthly views. You get handwriting with Apple Pencil, including the ability to annotate your schedule. You get stickers and stamps to decorate your pages. And you get basic templates to structure your planning.
For a lot of people, that’s enough. If your planning routine is “look at what’s coming up this week, write some notes around it, and move on with your day,” the free version handles that without compromise.
BASIC Plan — $3.49/month
The BASIC plan is for people who want to go deeper with their planning setup. It unlocks:
Cloud storage — Your planner data gets backed up to the cloud, so if something happens to your iPad, your plans aren’t lost. This also means smoother syncing if you use the app across contexts.
Image support — Add photos and images to your planner pages. This is useful for visual planning — mood boards, reference images, screenshots of documents you need to act on, or just making your planner pages feel more personal.
Annual calendar view — See your entire year at a glance. For long-term planning, goal tracking, or just getting a sense of how your year is shaping up, this view adds a perspective that daily and weekly views can’t provide.
At $3.49/month, that works out to roughly $42 per year. We’ll put that number in context shortly.
PLUS Plan — $5.49/month
The PLUS plan includes everything in BASIC, with one key addition:
Priority customer support — Your questions and issues get handled first. If you rely on the app for daily planning and something isn’t working, this ensures you’re not waiting in a general queue.
At $5.49/month, that’s about $66 per year.
How This Compares to Other iPad Planning Setups
Here’s where the pricing conversation gets interesting — because the real comparison isn’t just “app vs. app.” It’s “planning system vs. planning system.”
The PDF Template Route
The most popular way to plan on iPad right now is to buy a PDF planner template and import it into a note-taking app like GoodNotes or Notability.
Sounds cheap at first. GoodNotes costs about $10 as a one-time purchase (though it’s moved toward subscriptions recently). A decent PDF template on Etsy runs $10–30. But most people don’t stop at one template — you buy a few before finding the right layout, and you need a new dated template every year. Realistically, you’re spending $20–50 on templates annually, on top of the app cost.
And here’s the thing nobody mentions: your PDF planner doesn’t sync with your calendar. At all. Every event you want to see in your planner, you write by hand. Every schedule change, you erase and rewrite. The “cost” isn’t just money — it’s the daily friction of maintaining two disconnected systems.
Pencil Planner
Pencil Planner is the closest competitor in the “native planner app with calendar sync” category. It’s free to start with in-app purchases for premium features. The subscription runs around $12–15 per year. That’s cheaper than Planner for iPad’s premium plans — but Pencil Planner is primarily focused on the calendar-writing experience and offers fewer customization options for the planner pages themselves.
Zinnia
Zinnia is a beautiful visual journaling and planning app with an extensive sticker and template library. But at roughly $60–120 per year for the premium tier, it’s significantly more expensive. Zinnia is ideal if your planning is heavily creative and visual — think scrapbook-style journals — but it’s more than most people need for everyday schedule management.
NotePlan
NotePlan combines daily planning with Markdown note-taking and task management. It’s powerful for text-heavy workflows, but at about $10/month ($120/year), it’s in a different price bracket entirely. And it’s designed more for typed productivity workflows than for Apple Pencil handwriting.
Paper Planners
A quality paper planner — a Hobonichi Techo, an Erin Condren LifePlanner, or even a well-made Moleskine weekly — costs $25–60 per year. Some people spend more. And paper planners don’t sync with anything, can’t be backed up, and can’t be undone.
The Real Math
Here’s a simple comparison of annual costs for an iPad planning setup:
- Planner for iPad (free tier): $0/year
- Planner for iPad (BASIC): ~$42/year
- Planner for iPad (PLUS): ~$66/year
- GoodNotes + Etsy templates: ~$30–60/year (new templates annually)
- Pencil Planner (premium): ~$12–15/year
- Zinnia (premium): ~$60–120/year
- NotePlan: ~$120/year
- Paper planner (mid-range): ~$30–60/year
The free tier of Planner for iPad gives you something that most of these alternatives don’t include at any price: live calendar sync with Apple Pencil handwriting. That alone eliminates the daily overhead of copying events between apps.
The BASIC plan at $42/year is comparable to what you’d spend replacing your Etsy PDF template collection each January — except you also get cloud backup, image support, and a year-long calendar view, and you never have to “set up” a new planner again.
Which Plan Should You Choose?
Stay free if you plan simply — you sync your calendar, write around your events, and that’s your routine. The free version is genuine and complete for this workflow.
Go BASIC if you want your planning data backed up, you like adding images to your pages, or you want the annual overview for long-range planning. This is where most users will find the best value.
Go PLUS if you use the app daily and want the peace of mind that any issues get resolved quickly. Priority support matters most to people who’ve made the app central to their daily workflow.
One More Thing
Planner for iPad doesn’t gate core planning features behind a paywall. Calendar sync, Apple Pencil handwriting, daily/weekly/monthly views, stickers, templates — all free. The premium plans add depth and convenience, not necessities.
That’s a deliberate choice. We believe your planning tool should work for you before it asks you to pay for it.