Sounds like there’s no Apple walled garden lock-in for recipients of the Invites? Only for creating/managing them?
Also, Apple should not be in the business of making social apps. Hardware and OS is plenty lock-in aka fiefdoms as it is.
I have some sympathy for Apple here; they are selling a premium walled garden, and nearly all popular social apps do one or more things that are rather antithetical to their brand.
When I think of people I know who have iCloud+ subscriptions, it's mostly people who thought they needed them because of the scary notifications their phones sent them about running out of their initial 5GB of storage (which of course is not enough for any modern phone).
These are not people who are going to download and figure out how to use a new invite app. They are going to keep using evite just like they always have.
There are some people who may use iCloud+ or a bundle because they like the fitness features or have a family that makes it make sense. I probably know some people like this. But I have never had a conversation with anyone about iCloud+, ever in my life. Only dealt with questions from non-tech-savvy family members who were scared about notifications that they were running out of space and needed to "upgrade" to this paid service.
If you don't want to use it to create invitations, don't. There's zero requirement for you to have an account if others invite you to something, and it sounds kind of preposterous to complain about other people choosing to pay for a service that you can then participate with for free.
And it's obviously not likely to get anyone over the pay wall to buy iCloud+. This invitation feature has many free competitors. I don't begrudge Apple for creating this, but I won't be surprised if I keep getting evites and paperless post invites, and never an Apple Invite or whatever it's called.
If Apple did not lock this behind iCloud+ I think it would have quickly become a standard for a lot of users and been another feather in Apple’s cap of why a user might want an iPhone. Maybe they could have added upsells like gift an Apple Card or something or made money through affiliate gift giving links or something.
I was quite surprised to learn it wasn't free. I had heard about this "sherlocking" on Twitter but hadn't read the details. I can't think of a time when Apple Sherlocked something but didn't make it free. In fact, making it free is kind of part in parcel of Sherlocking, since that's what really kills the other business. Here, plenty of people will keep using the existing competitors because they don't want to have to pay for iCloud+.
I get that the iCloud tiers start cheap, but having 50GB doesn't really do anything for me since it's still not big enough to back up an iPhone. And there's zero chance I'm going to start paying for a monthly service in order to get access to an evite clone that I would use a couple times a year. Maybe there are big partiers out there that would upgrade just for this, but this seems like an impending flop to me.
I have iCloud+ base tier, but I use it just for iMessage, Drive, and other non-photo apps (I back up my photos to my NAS). I don’t back up my whole phone because all the data I care about is already backed up. I also like being able to use Private Relay when I want. All that is to say that for me the $1 plan is great and I still have plenty of space for shared album photos from events (which I later will move off of iCloud). But I get that I’m a pretty unusual use case.