Cleanup App Alternative: Free, No Ads, No Weekly Fee (vs Cleanup by Codeway)

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Pixtide is a free iPhone photo cleaner that works as a Cleanup app alternative: no ads, no subscription and no daily delete cap, checked on the App Store on 2026-09-25. Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner by Codeway lists weekly plans from $5.95 to $11.99 in the US, and September 2026 reviewers report about 5 free deletions a day. Cleanup does far more than Pixtide, including duplicates, email and contacts.

This page is written by the Pixtide team (we make Pixtide). We name where the other app wins.

The short verdict

Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner by Codeway is an all-in-one storage cleaner, and Pixtide is a single-purpose swipe sorter. Pick Cleanup if you want one app to merge duplicates, clean a Gmail inbox, merge contacts and compress videos, and you are prepared to pay a subscription for it. Pick Pixtide if you want to go through your camera roll yourself, photo by photo and video by video, without a paywall, ads or a limit on how many items you can remove in a day.

The two apps also make different choices about who decides. Cleanup groups similar photos and marks one as "Best", and, in the words of its own site, the other ones go to trash by default. Pixtide never pre-selects anything: you swipe right to keep, left to delete and down to decide later.

If duplicates are your main problem, you may not need either app. Apple's Duplicates album, covered below, is free and has no cap.

How Pixtide and Cleanup compare

The table below compares Pixtide with Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner by Codeway on 13 objective points, all checked on the App Store on 2026-09-25 unless a row says otherwise. The Cleanup listing is at apps.apple.com/us/app/cleanup-phone-storage-cleaner/id1510944943.

Prices vary by region and change often. The weekly figures come from the US in-app purchase list on 2026-09-25, so check the paywall in the app before starting a trial.

Why people look for a Cleanup alternative

The weekly price is the most common complaint about Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner in recent App Store reviews. We read 647 unique US reviews on 2026-09-25, and about 80 of the 209 low-star ones were about the weekly fee. One reviewer wrote: "Seriously? $11.99 a WEEK?!!!" (1 star, 2026-09-13). Another, who still gave four stars, did the sum: "That's $624 a year." (4 stars, 2026-08-18).

The second theme is billing during the trial. The listing advertises a 7-day free trial that renews "based on the annual subscription plan", while about 67 low-star reviews describe being charged during a trial or after cancelling. One reads: "signed up for a 7 day trial and was charged 39.95 instantly" (1 star, 2026-09-18).

The third is the free delete cap: "I selected 200 photos, take me 20 minutes, then it told me I can only delete 5" (1 star, 2026-09-04). The trend shows in the numbers: the 500 most recent reviews, from 2026-09-03 to 2026-09-24, average 3.64 stars with 25% one-star, against a lifetime average of 4.65.

What the Cleanup free tier includes

Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner is free to download, but the free tier is a sample rather than a working cleaner. More than eight reviews from September 2026 describe a limit of 5 deletions a day, and third-party roundups describe the same cap as 5 deletions without an ad and 20 to 25 per ad watched. Macgasm, which ranked Cleanup fifth on 2026-08-17 and called it "the highest-priced app", reported 10 to 30 second video ads in the free tier, shown even to open a feature or menu. The App Store listing does not mention ads.

About 32 low-star reviews use the words "not free". One reviewer put it this way: the developers "gate 98% of their functionality behind a paywall and call themselves free" (1 star, 2026-09-17). A lifetime purchase is named in the description but does not appear among the listed in-app purchases; third parties report it at $40 to $49.99.

Pixtide has no free tier because it has no paid tier. There is no subscription, no in-app purchase and no premium version, so every swipe and every deletion is available from the first launch. Our guide to which photo cleaner apps are free lists the limits of the other popular cleaners.

What an independent researcher found

The sharpest outside criticism of Cleanup comes from Connor Tumbleson, an independent researcher who examined the app after his grandmother was charged $7.99 a week for it. In Predatory iOS Cleanup Applications, published on 2025-01-13, he names Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner by Codeway as his main example and describes the category as "Priced in a predatory manner with ads that target the elderly across Facebook & YouTube."

Tumbleson makes three further points worth knowing. First, many of the features these apps sell are already built into iOS. Second, the first launch leads straight to a paywall, with a free trial and a lifetime offer. Third, the pricing tells its own story: "A lifetime payment of $40 suggests most people won't stay subscribed more than 5 weeks." His traffic check of version 4.19.1 found Adjust, Firebase, Cerebro, Admost, Facebook and Unity Ads SDKs in the app.

These are Tumbleson's findings and words, not ours, and they describe an older version. We cite them because they are the most detailed public analysis of how weekly cleanup subscriptions work.

The privacy label and the description disagree

Cleanup's App Store listing says "OFFLINE AND PRIVATE" and "No tracking or data misuse", and its App Privacy label on the same page lists three kinds of "Data Used to Track You": Purchases, Identifiers and Usage Data. The label, checked on 2026-09-25, also lists email and user ID as linked to you for developer marketing and app functionality, and identifiers and usage data, including advertising data, for analytics.

Apple defines tracking as linking data from an app with data from other companies' apps or websites for advertising, or sharing it with data brokers. That is a statement the developer makes on the label, so the label is the more precise of the two texts. Nothing we found suggests Cleanup uploads photos, and we do not claim it does.

Pixtide's label, checked on 2026-09-25, has no tracking section. It lists only data not linked to you, from anonymous usage statistics that can be switched off in Settings. Pixtide has no account, no server that receives photos and no ad SDK. Our guide on whether photo cleaner apps are safe explains how to read these labels.

Where Cleanup wins

Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner by Codeway is the most rated cleaner we track, with 4.65 from 723,495 US ratings and 4.59 from 90,924 UK ratings, checked on the App Store on 2026-09-25. It ranks fourth in Utilities in the US and has been on the store since 2020-12-05, so it has years of updates behind it. Pixtide launched in 2026 and is newer than the others, with far fewer ratings.

Cleanup also reaches more people and does more jobs. It is available in 18 languages and runs on iOS 15.0 or later, where Pixtide needs iOS 18.0. It finds duplicates, similar photos, similar screenshots and lookalike videos, and one five-star reviewer went "from over 50,000 photos to 21,000" (5 stars, 2026-09-19). Beyond photos it cleans a Gmail inbox (500 emails a day), merges contacts, compresses videos, turns Live Photos into stills, hides items in a Secret Space vault and adds widgets. Pixtide does none of these.

Cleanup has a swipe mode too, which it calls a bonus. Per its own FAQ it covers the Videos and Other categories, and it has a Keep List for items you want to protect.

How Pixtide works instead

Pixtide is built around one gesture, applied to the whole camera roll. You pick a month, a year, a category (screenshots, videos, selfies, Live Photos, panoramas, favourites or bursts), your recent photos or On This Day, then swipe: right keeps, left marks for deletion, down puts the photo in a Decide Later queue. Nothing is scored, grouped or pre-selected by an algorithm.

Swiping only marks a photo. When the session ends, a review screen shows every marked photo and video, so you can rescue anything before you confirm. An Undo button under the card steps back through the whole session. Confirmed deletions go to the iPhone's Recently Deleted album, where Apple keeps them for 30 days, as described on Apple's page about deleting and recovering photos.

Videos play inline with sound and a scrub bar, so a long clip can be checked before it goes. Progress is saved, so a month can be finished across several sittings. Stats show photos reviewed and storage freed, and smart reminders send at most one notification a day.

Other Cleanup alternatives

A Cleanup alternative does not have to be Pixtide, and for some jobs it should not be. The strongest free option is already on your iPhone: Apple's Photos app has a Duplicates album under Utilities, which merges exact copies with no limit, and Media Types albums for screenshots, videos and selfies. Apple's guide to deleting or hiding photos and videos covers selecting many items at once.

Clever Cleaner: AI CleanUp App by CleverFiles is the closest like-for-like replacement: 4.8 from about 83,000 US ratings, no ads and an unlimited free Swipe mode by month, checked on 2026-09-25. Since version 3.0 on 2026-08-17 it has a $6.99 weekly plan, a $39.99 lifetime purchase and daily limits on its other tools for new users. Our Clever Cleaner alternative page compares it in detail.

If you came from another swipe app, the Swipewipe alternative page covers that one, and the subscription trap guide explains how weekly plans are designed.

One honest limitation

Pixtide is narrower than Cleanup, and some of that is a real gap. Pixtide does not detect duplicates or similar photos, so for merging copies use Apple's Duplicates album or a duplicate finder. For burst photos Pixtide shows and deletes only the representative photo, not every frame in the burst. It runs on iPhone only and needs iOS 18 or later, so an older iPhone that Cleanup supports on iOS 15 cannot run it. The app is in English, where Cleanup offers 18 languages. If you need email cleaning, contact merging, video compression or a private vault, Pixtide has none of them.

How we compared

We compared the two apps on the US App Store on 2026-09-25. For Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner we used the App Store listing and its in-app purchase list, the App Privacy label, Apple's public lookup data for ratings, and 647 unique US reviews (344 five-star, 48 four-star, 46 three-star, 42 two-star, 167 one-star). We added Codeway's own site and FAQ, the Connor Tumbleson article and published roundups from Macgasm and others. Review counts per theme are our own tallies and are approximate. Where a feature is not mentioned in the listing we say so, rather than claiming the app lacks it.

Pixtide at a glance

• Free: no subscription, no in-app purchases, no premium tier.
• No ads.
• No AI: you decide every photo.
• Works entirely on your phone: no account, no photo ever uploaded.
• Swiping only marks a photo; you review everything before confirming, and deleted photos stay in Recently Deleted for 30 days.
• Photos and videos, sorted by month, year, category or recent shots.
• iPhone with iOS 18.0 or later.

Pixtide is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner. All product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. This comparison reflects publicly available information as of September 2026; pricing and features change, so please check each app's App Store listing for the latest details.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Cleanup app really free?

Only partly. Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner by Codeway is free to download, but September 2026 reviewers report a free tier of about 5 deletions a day with video ads, and unlimited use needs Cleanup Pro. The US App Store lists weekly plans from $5.95 to $11.99 and a $29.99 yearly plan, checked on 2026-09-25. Pixtide is free with no in-app purchases, no ads and no delete cap.

How much does the Cleanup app cost per week?

Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner by Codeway lists nine "Cleanup Pro 1 Week" price points in the US, from $5.95 to $11.99 a week, checked on the App Store on 2026-09-25. Reviewers in September 2026 quote $11.99 a week, which one reviewer put at $624 a year. The price you see can vary, so check the paywall before starting a trial.

Does the Cleanup app track you?

The App Privacy label of Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner by Codeway, checked on 2026-09-25, lists Purchases, Identifiers and Usage Data as "Data Used to Track You", although the same listing says "No tracking or data misuse". Pixtide's label has no tracking section: it lists only data not linked to you, and photos never leave the phone.

What is the best free alternative to the Cleanup app?

For duplicates, Apple's own Duplicates album in the Photos app is free and unlimited. For going through a camera roll one photo at a time, Pixtide is a free swipe photo cleaner for iPhone with no ads, no subscription and no delete cap, checked in September 2026. Clever Cleaner by CleverFiles has an unlimited free Swipe mode, but limits its other tools for new users since August 2026.

Can I get photos back after deleting them with a cleaner app?

Usually yes, for 30 days. Photos deleted on an iPhone, including through apps that use Apple's Photos library such as Pixtide, go to the Recently Deleted album and stay there for 30 days unless you empty it. In Pixtide, swiping only marks a photo, and a review screen shows everything marked before you confirm.