Both stores.
One agent.
Running on a cron.

How does this compare to aso-mcp? Isn't that free?

It is free, it is MIT, and it is good — be clear-eyed about this before you pay us anything. It gives an agent 20 tools for App Store keyword research, competitor analysis, review sentiment, rank history and App Store Connect metadata updates, including a batch update across up to 40 locales in one call, which is better than anything we ship. If you are iOS-only and want research plus a metadata push, download theirs and keep your $99.

Where we differ, and it is not small: aso-mcp does not touch Google Play at all — no Play keyword research, no Play rank tracking, no way to write a Play Console listing. We do all three through the official Android Publisher API. We also have category chart tracking, a cron script with webhook and Slack alerts, a persistent competitor registry with rank history, a field-level change log across both stores, and hysteresis. 56 tools versus 20, across two stores versus one. Buy StoreScout if you ship on both stores and want the history to accumulate on its own. Otherwise, genuinely, use theirs.

What happens when my license expires?

It downgrades. It never bricks. For 14 days past expiry your paid tier keeps working untouched — that grace window exists so a lapsed card cannot kill your nightly cron mid-run. After that StoreScout falls back to the free tier: every read-only analysis tool keeps working forever, your local history database is untouched and nothing is deleted. Renew and the same data is there.

The server also starts warning you 30 days out, in its own output, so the date does not ambush you. This was coded before it was written down: a license problem of any kind — expired, malformed, wrong signature — degrades to the free tier with a note on stderr. It is never allowed to crash your server.

Is any of my data sent anywhere? Do you see my store credentials?

No. There is no StoreScout server. The only hosts StoreScout talks to are Apple (api.appstoreconnect.apple.com, itunes.apple.com, rss.applemarketingtools.com), Google (androidpublisher.googleapis.com, oauth2.googleapis.com, and play.google.com for public-storefront scraping) and any Slack or webhook URL you configure.

Your .p8 and your Play service-account JSON stay on disk; JWT signing happens locally. Your license key is verified offline against a public key compiled into the code and is never transmitted. No telemetry, no analytics, no usage reporting — and because there is no license server we cannot see whether you are running it at all. Your keyword history lives in a local SQLite file you can delete whenever you like.

Why annual only? I would rather pay monthly.

Your license is a signed token with an expiry date that your own machine verifies offline. There is no server to check in with — which is exactly why your credentials and your data never leave your laptop, and also why a monthly plan would mean re-issuing your key twelve times a year and chasing failed cards on software we cannot remotely switch off. Annual keeps the mechanism simple and the price honest. Pro is about $12 a month if that helps the comparison.

Why AGPL-3.0?

Two reasons, one defensive and one for you. Defensive: AGPL stops a competitor taking this closed-source and selling it back to you as a SaaS. For you: the code that holds your publishing credentials is code you can read, audit and fork.

For normal use — running it locally as an MCP server for your own or your clients' apps — the AGPL asks nothing of you; its network clause is about serving the program to remote users, which a local stdio server is not. If you need to run it inside a product you distribute, email us and we will tell you plainly where things stand.

Do I need my own App Store Connect key?

For anything that reads or writes your real iOS listing, yes: an App Store Connect API key with the App Manager role, which is the only path Apple allows. For Android you need a Google Play service account with the Android Publisher API enabled and store-listing permission granted in Play Console. Both are free to create and take about five minutes each; storescout-setup auto-detects the .p8 and the service-account JSON if you leave them in the folder you run it from.

You need no credentials for the free analysis tools — audits, review mining, keyword scoring and competitor research on both stores all run on public data.

What if Apple changes their API, or Google changes their store pages?

Both happen, and they are different risks. Apple's side runs on documented, versioned APIs — App Store Connect, iTunes Search, the marketing RSS feeds — which are stable and which we track. The Google Play write side uses the official Android Publisher API v3, also documented and stable.

The Google Play analysis side scrapes the public storefront because no official search API exists, and that is the piece that breaks: when it does, those tools fail until we ship a fix, and we make no SLA promise about it. We put Play analysis in the free tier partly for that reason. If a breakage ever makes the paid surface substantially unusable for an extended period, write to us — we would rather refund than argue.

What exactly counts as an "app" against my limit?

Only apps you have put into rank or chart tracking. Looking an app up, auditing it, reading its metadata or registering it as a competitor does not consume a slot — we count tracking, not curiosity. Ask your agent to run storescout_license any time to see your tier, status, expiry, apps used and remaining, and which tool groups are unlocked.

Can I move my license to another machine?

Yes. The license is a text token tied to your email, not to hardware. Put it in ~/.storescout/license.jwt (or the STORESCOUT_LICENSE_KEY environment variable) on the new machine and it works. Pro covers one machine, Studio five plus CI — terms we ask you to honour, not something we technically enforce, because enforcing them would need the phone-home we deliberately do not have. Lost your key? Email us from the address you bought with and we will resend it.

Do you offer refunds?

Yes — 14 days, no questions. Know what you are agreeing to on both sides: because licenses verify offline there is no revocation list, so we cannot technically switch a refunded key off before its expiry date. We refund on trust and ask you to stop using the key.

If you are unsure whether StoreScout fits, run the free tier first — it is a complete read-only ASO analyst for both stores and will tell you most of what you need to know before any money changes hands.

Is the Android side as good as the iOS side?

Partly, and the split matters. Android write is first-class: official Publisher API, transactional edits, change logging identical to iOS. Android keyword research is genuinely good, and in one way better than iOS because Play exposes install counts.

But Android rank tracking is scraped from the public storefront, so it is shallower and noisier than iOS's fixed top 200 and only directionally reliable — and Android chart-position tracking does not exist at all, because Google publishes no RSS equivalent. If Android rank history is the only reason you are buying, buy something else.

Which MCP clients does it work with?

It is a standard MCP server over stdio, so any client that can launch a stdio server works — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and others. Claude Code gets one extra: a bundled /aso-optimize slash command that runs the whole pipeline end to end, for iOS or Android, across multiple locales. Everywhere else you drive the same tools by asking.

What is on the roadmap, and what will you never build?

Never: a web dashboard, hosted credential storage, or any service that holds your keys. Those are the whole reason this can be a $99/yr self-hosted tool instead of a $79/mo SaaS.

As for what is next, we are not going to publish a roadmap we have not built. Buy it for what it does today.