Practitioner pattern · Tammy Taw (Works at Google Play; recommends Play Store features such as installment payments, Play Console benchmarking and Play Academy)
Once subscriptions plateau, sell repeatable one-off packs like credits, boosts or class bundles
Hybrid buyers: ~7% of buyers, ~25% of revenue, spend ~3x more (Play-wide data)
Workedpricingupsell-expansion
What they did
First optimize the subscription business; once most remaining users won't pay recurring, add consumable IAPs that can be bought again and again: tips/gifts in social apps, boosts or 'send flowers' in dating, packs of classes in fitness, AI generation credits or message quotas, higher video quality tiers. Prefer repeat-purchase consumables over one-time lifetime unlocks ('this paintbrush for a lifetime'), which leave nothing more to sell. Think in buyer cohorts and wallet sizes to limit cannibalization; accept that average revenue per paying user may drop while buyer percentage rises, and check LTV, acquisition and operating costs before deciding. Strongest in comics, dating, social and tools, and in Asia, Africa and the Middle East where almost half of buyers purchase consumables.
What happened
Across Google Play, hybrid buyers (subscription plus IAP) are about 7% of buyers but bring in about a quarter of revenue, and spend about 3x more per year than subscription-only or IAP-only buyers.
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · How to Unlock Revenue Growth on Google Play — Tammy Taw, Google“the next step after optimizing subscription, once you know you kind of saturated that, most of your users are not willing to buy month-to-month or recurring price points, maybe they have an appetite for these one-time only purchases.”
“comics, dating, social, and tooling apps are ones that have more consumable features.”
“the average stat that we see is they make up a 7% of total buyers, but they can bring in a quarter of the revenue”
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