Just to clarify a bit: you only need to pay if you want to distribute your app on the iTunes Store.
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Last time I checked (but perhaps it changed), if I wanted to install my own app on my own iPhone I would have not only to pay for a developer license, but also a special enterprise deployment fee (for non public apps).
I am not a professional developer and I like to tinker, create my own tools. But it is uneconomical for me to pay all these fees just to run my own app on my own hardware. I ended up going the web app route.
That has never been true. The enterprise deployment fee is only needed if you want to deploy it to OTHER phones besides your own and even then it would have to be a lot of them before it mattered.
The developer license is all you need to put it on your own phone. Source: Started developing iOS apps in 2008.
Are you referring to free provisioning? My understanding [1] is that it is only for temporary testing an app on the device, you can't leave the app permanently, you have to reinstall it regularly.
And you still have to pay a yearly fee, which creates a high barrier to entry for non professionals.
[1] https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/getting_started/ins...
There are three levels: $300/yr for "enterprise" allows you to deploy your app on a large number of devices within your organization (and the terms of service are very explicit that the devices must be under your control: not even for testing by a customer at an off-site location unless you are overseeing), $100/yr for an individual or company normal developer license that lets you install your app for testing purposes on up to 100 of your devices for one year (after which point the apps expire and you have to reinstall them), or $0 for truly "free" provisioning (no yearly fee) which lets you install up to three apps (total; not per account: across all free accounts any device can have only three such apps) on a device using a slightly limited set of APIs (for example: no VPN support) which expire every seven days.
Clearly the free tier is pretty worthless in the grand scheme of things, and being able to write software for you but not being able to legitimately give it to anyone else not also paying the $100/yr "please let me own the piece of hardware you sold me instead of renting it" tax is not really acceptable for people trying to learn to write software as a big part of software is being able to give it to other people. In practice, though, a lot of people are seriously only learning to develop so that one day they can pay the full Apple developer tax and deploy their apps to the App Store under the Apple software approval process, and so it works out: like, to them, software development is all about writing software for Apple hardware under Apple's rules, and that's what Apple wants anyway. The entire scenario makes me feel a little sick: this shouldn't even be legal as far as I'm concerned.
There is no yearly fee when using free provisioning.