I am working on an app that uses a fair number of moderately sized images. I have been prototyping the app by pulling the images down from a web server and caching them. I am somewhat concerned that if I sell an app on the app store that relies on images being available from a server, that I will be obligated to keep paying for the server indefinitely. What is a reasonable expectation for a developer to keep images available on a server for the life of an app? What is the reasonable supported life of an app? Embedding the images in the app is not an option because access to the images on a server is a core part of the functionality. Would a free app with subscription model make more sense? If I decided that I wanted to stop selling one year subscriptions at some point, could I remove the app from the store and terminate the server after the last subscription expired?
