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Rise Science · B2C · sleep and energy app

On the web, charge half price for the first month instead of a free trial

Tested better than free trials; ads stop finding people who cancel at once

Workedpricingweb-to-apppaid-social

What they did

On web funnels, mostly no free trial; instead a heavily discounted first period (example: first month at half price). Rationale: the ad platform optimizes on paying users rather than trial starters who cancel a minute later. Free trials still used in some cases. Guest notes results depend on the app and must be tested.

What happened

Found 'through testing that that works better for us'; helps the ad algorithm optimize

In their words

Why Web Onboarding Should Sell The Problem, Instead Of The Solution – Leon Sasson, Rise Science

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David BarnardAnd you're getting high chargebacks and high refunds, which means your payment acceptance rate is lower.

Leon SassonNow, back to your real question of monetization, packaging. I mean, like everything, we experiment a lot. We have found two major learnings. One is, yes, it needs to be different. We tend to skew to shorter-term plans, so monthly, quarterly. But we test everything, because we found the users are in a very different consideration phase. And then two, we tend to not offer free trials on web, which is maybe the biggest difference. And in some cases we do offer, but most of the time, we don't. And instead, we found that offering heavily discounted trial period, so, "Hey, the first month might be half the price." Or whatever measure it might be, ends up being a lot more promising for a bunch of reasons. It helps the algorithm optimize a lot better, so it's not finding people that start trials and then automatically cancel a minute later. So we have found through testing that that works better for us.

Leon SassonI know some people do find that through trials in web works just as well, so I don't think this is a... Everything on pricing, monetization, it sort of depends heavily on your space, and your app, and your brand, so everything needs to be tested. But for us, yes, pricing, packaging is very different than the app directly.

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Tags: paid-trial, discount, no-free-trial, ad-optimization, web-funnel