App user acquisition
The funnel does not end at install. It barely starts there.
For a subscription app, media buying is maybe half the job. The other half is what happens between opening the app and the second renewal – and no amount of cheap traffic survives a funnel that leaks there.
The five numbers that decide everything
Every subscription app's economics reduce to the same chain. Multiply across it and you have your cost per paying subscriber; compare that to what a subscriber is worth and you have your business.
Media buying influences the first step and, through what the ad promises, the second. Almost nothing after that. Which is why an agency that only touches the ad accounts can hand you a beautiful cost per install and a business that loses money.
Where we look before recommending more spend
Paywall placement
Whether the paywall appears before the user has understood anything, at the moment of first value, or after an arbitrary number of sessions. This single decision usually moves trial start rate more than any creative test will.
Trial length and payment gating
Three days versus seven, card up front versus not. These trade volume against conversion rate in opposite directions, so the right answer depends on how fast your product delivers something visible. Both are testable in days if the paywall is remotely configurable.
Plan mix and price framing
Which plan is pre-selected, how the annual saving is expressed, whether there is a decoy tier. Cheap to test, and it moves revenue per trial rather than the number of trials, which is the more durable half.
Involuntary churn
A meaningful share of cancellations are not decisions – they are failed payments. Billing-retry settings, grace periods and account-hold configuration recover a chunk of that for no acquisition cost at all, and most apps have never opened those settings.
Reporting to payback, not to install
We build cohorts by source, campaign and creative, and track each one to the month it becomes profitable. It is the only view that answers the question you actually have – should we spend more here – and no ad platform dashboard produces it, because none of them can see your renewals.
Questions people actually ask
- What is a good trial-to-paid rate?
- It depends far more on trial length and payment gating than on category. A short trial with card details up front converts at a much higher rate than a long trial without them, but produces fewer trials in the first place. Compare yourself to your own previous cohorts before comparing to anyone else's median.
- Should the trial be three days or seven?
- Three tends to produce a higher conversion rate and lower total paid volume; seven tends to do the reverse. Which is better depends on whether your app delivers a visible result inside three days. Habit products usually need seven; utilities that solve one problem often do better on three.
- Hard paywall or soft?
- A hard paywall raises immediate conversion and shrinks the top of the funnel, so it suits products with obvious value and a short time-to-value. A soft paywall builds a larger retargetable base and delays revenue. The decision should follow from your payback tolerance, not from what a competitor does.
- How long should payback take?
- The honest constraint is your cash position, not a benchmark. Venture-funded apps routinely accept 9-12 months; a bootstrapped app usually needs under six or growth strangles working capital. We set the target with you before scaling and report against it monthly.
- Can you help with the paywall itself?
- We design and prioritise the tests and read the results. Implementation sits with your team or your subscription platform – RevenueCat, Adapty and Superwall all support remote paywall configuration, which makes this loop much faster than shipping a build per test.
- What about win-back and churn?
- Cheaper than acquisition every time. Billing-retry configuration, grace periods and win-back offers routinely recover a meaningful share of involuntary churn, and most apps have never touched them. We check that before recommending you spend more on the top of the funnel.
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Read the guides first if you prefer.
Paywall testing, trial length, and what the benchmark numbers actually mean. Free, no email, and more useful than a sales call.