Is 1 Second Everyday free?

Peter Theill · 12 November 2026

Yes. 1 Second Everyday is free to download, and you can use it for as long as you like with one snippet a day. What costs money is Pro: $49.99 a year or $9.99 a month in the App Store, or $249 once for what 1SE calls Life of Pro. Films from the free version end with 1SE's branding.

What the free version includes

1SE's own help centre puts it in one line: without Pro, 1SE is free to use with one snippet a day. That's enough for the classic film, one second from each day, over as many months or years as you like.

Everything else is on the list of what Pro adds (as of October 2026): backup of all your projects, as many projects as you need, music, snippets of up to 10 seconds, more than one snippet a day, removing the date stamps and the 1SE branding from your films, brightness and volume for each snippet, filters, projects made together with friends, no ads, HD and 4K export, and priority support.

Two of those matter if you're starting a ten-year project. Without Pro, a snippet can be 1.5 seconds at most. And backup to 1SE's cloud is part of Pro, so without Pro your snippets are stored in the app on your phone.

What Pro costs

In the app, Pro is $49.99 a year or $9.99 a month (the App Store's prices on 12 November 2026). On 1SE's website there's also Life of Pro: $249 once, with nothing to renew.

Paid yearly at the US price, five years of Pro come to $249.95, about a dollar more than Life of Pro. Paying monthly, you pass $249 just after two years.

The App Store page still lists two one-time purchases, Remove 1SE Watermark and Unlimited Backup. 1SE's help centre says there's no separate backup-only plan now and lists removing the branding under Pro, so I wouldn't count on either. The Get Pro tab in the app shows what's for sale today.

If you stop paying

Your snippets stay. 1SE says nothing happens to the snippets on your phone when a subscription ends: you can keep watching them, editing them and adding new ones. The Pro features stop, so new snippets are back to 1.5 seconds and no new backups are made. The backup you already have is kept on 1SE's servers for 10 years, and you get it back if you subscribe again within that time.

What 1SE knows about you

According to its privacy label on the App Store, 1 Second Everyday may collect your email address, a user ID, a device ID and your purchase history, all linked to you. It may use the email address for its own advertising or marketing. The label has no section for data used to track you across other companies' apps. The same page says your seconds are never shared with anyone unless you decide to share them.

Is Pro worth it?

If you use 1 Second Everyday every day and want music and a backup, $49.99 a year is a fair price for an app that has been looked after since 2013 and holds 4.8 stars across 48,000 US ratings. If all you want is the film, the free version makes it, and you live with the branding at the end.

If you'd rather pay once

I made Glimt for people like me, who forget to film and don't want another subscription. Glimt costs $1.99, once. There are no in-app purchases, no ads and no watermark.

And you don't choose a clip each day. Glimt looks through the videos and Live Photos on your iPhone, picks the best second of each day and fills in the days you missed. Give it a few photos of your child and it prefers the seconds with that child in the picture. All of this happens on the phone, without an account, and nothing is uploaded.

1The second Glimt picked2Slide to move it

3The film so far4Missed days get filled in

1. The second Glimt picked
2. Slide to move it
3. The film so far
4. Missed days get filled in

What Glimt doesn't have: an Android version, music, a cloud backup of its own, or shared projects. It came out in November 2026, and 1 Second Everyday has thirteen years on it. If any of that matters to you, stay with 1SE.

Glimt on the App Store · The one-second-a-day apps compared

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