GTM Sauce

Flighty · B2C · flight tracking app

Give the first flight free with every pro feature, then lock some

Unknownpaywallpricing

What they did

Flighty moved from a hard paywall toward a hybrid: the first flight is fully free with all pro features, then some premium features lock after it. Host suggests the pattern for high-cost apps (e.g. one free deep research per month).

In their words

How a Single Paywall Experiment Generated $50M – Jeff Morris, Chapter One, Ex-Tinder

Play the episode

Jeff Morris… whatever it is because it's such a high utility product. If you're building something that's more social or less clear on what problem it's solving, then you might have a harder time asking the user to do that. If you can't raise venture dollars, then you should be confident you're building a product that people will pay for and you should ask people to pay for it and see what the response is. And I'm a big fan of monetizing early in that sense.

David BarnardYeah. And Flighty is an interesting example. It may have been that you used it at a time when it was a more of a hard paywall, but he was actually recently on the Launched podcast, which is kind of a sister podcast to this and they have been experimenting... And he was actually on Ben Thompson's podcast talking about this and he has experimented his way. And maybe this is one of those kind of examples too of like, over time you do kind of find that right fit, but he has a really interesting model where now the first flight is completely free with all the pro features. And then if I remember correctly, some premium features then get locked after the first flight. And so he had to really experiment into this hybrid thing. And so maybe that goes to our point, there's not like a set rule.

David BarnardYou need to experiment and be willing to experiment and not just follow the patterns, but figure out what's right for your app, is that he experimented his way into this weird kind of freemium where he does-

Get tactics like this every Monday

New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.

More from this episode

Tags: hybrid-freemium, usage-limited-trial, first-use-free