Weather Up · B2C · weather app with widgets
Put a feature demo video on the paywall, with hosted price buttons below
Went better than expected; built in under a day; guest gives no numbers
Workedpaywall
What they did
Built a custom SwiftUI paywall with a video of the interactive widgets behind RevenueCat's paywall footer view, which renders prices and the purchase button and handles purchase logic. Because offerings are remote, later paywall/price experiments needed no code or app update.
What happened
Paywalls went better than expected; developer built it in under a day.
- Stage
- launch
“So we use the RevenueCat footer view, where we built a custom SwiftUI paywall behind, where we're able to do the video, do a lot of like custom, fancy stuff”
“Paywalls went way better than I expected.”
Related topics
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More from Weather Up
All 11 Weather Up tactics- Ship a big update that gets featured by Apple and the press~$100K in the update year with almost no ads; halved the next year without updates
- When someone leaves a hard paywall, send a push offering 7 free daysFew took it and few of those paid; being replaced
- Let people close the paywall, give them 7 free days, then lock the app
More from this episode
- Weather Up: Pitch journalists with a short demo video in a Twitter DMCovered by TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacRumors and BGR, even by writers who rarely cover apps
- Weather Up: Hold new features back for one big launch to get attentionDownloads fell to ~15 a day during the 4-year wait; guest calls it a big regret
- Weather Up: Launch just before Vision Pro ships to avoid 'where's your Vision Pro app?'Landed an hour before Apple's DMA news; fewer articles, no social buzz, no Apple feature
- Weather Up: Launch a weather app at $40 a year with no launch saleClose to 2,000 subscribers, but press readers balked at $40 next to a $30 competitor
- Weather Up: Relaunch with one or two new features and a limited-time sale
- Weather Up: Pre-select the yearly plan on the paywall, not the monthly oneMonthly default got ~10% more subscribers but 60% lower revenue per user in month one
- Weather Up: Test $40 against $39.99 for the yearly plan
- Build a mirror app and rank for the word 'mirror' in the App StoreCaptured 6-8K of 10-20K daily 'mirror' searches at peak
- Make a $0.99 app free and sell themes plus a $10 bundleMany bought the $10 bundle; earned $10 a sale instead of $0.99
- Contrast: Buy ads for paid-upfront appsLost money; spent thousands of dollars in the early App Store
- Contrast: Give developers a revenue share instead of paying them by the hourStopped losing money on stalled projects; partners working on the side ship slowly
- Launch Center Pro: Save features for big paid-app launches that spike revenueUp to $60K in a launch week vs hundreds of dollars a day otherwise
- Dark Noise: Add interactive widgets when iOS 17 ships to land in Apple's listsPicked first in an editorial list; 'massively impactful', no numbers; other lists did little
- RevenueCat: Launch again and again, dressing up each fundraise as a launchFirst Reddit post got some traction; no numbers