GTM Sauce

Sway AI · B2C · dating profile feedback app

Sell AI photo packs at $14.99 for one and $49.99 for ten

Biggest upsell in the app; no spending cap lets big spenders pay more

Workedupsell-expansionpricing

What they did

Users pick a look, upload photos of their face, buy a photo pack ($14.99 single or $49.99 for 10), and receive AI-optimized dating photos by email. No cap on how much one user can spend, capturing App Store 'whales' (insight from a co-founder who had built a game).

What happened

The biggest upsell in the app; a key reason LTV is very high
Stage
monetization

In their words

Daniel Heintzma - I speedran a new app from 0 to $2m/year in 6 months (here's how)

Play from 18:40
18:35

Joseph ChoiOh, so you do um additional in-app purchases for credits?

18:40

Daniel HeintzmanYeah, I mean we started at once we after we launched, we noticed that people were going through this flow like multiple times, more than we had anticipated. And so we added this as a way to like like further monetize the power users. And I think this paywall itself I think like contributes to like over 10%. I think like 11% of revenue like comes from like the additional upsell here. The biggest upsell of this app, actually, is we added these photo packs, which is AI-optimized photos where you can like look at these AI photos, and then well you upload pictures of your face, and then we'll create

19:13

Daniel Heintzmanpictures based off of the look here. We would go through this flow, you would purchase these photo packs, and then upload pictures of yourself, and then we'll email you you in that photo pack, if that makes sense.

19:24

Joseph ChoiAnd how what was the what was the pricing on each of the packs?

19:28

Daniel HeintzmanWe did like a 10 pack and then a one pack, and the pricing was like that. It was like $14.99, and then $49.99 for the 10-photo pack. I think what is unique about this is something that I had saw from other apps is ones that were offering and defaulting to an annual plan are the ones that like had a pretty good like LTV. We defaulted the annual plan in order to like collect more revenue upfront to fuel the growth. We also tried out weekly plan, but that's like a lot slower growth, right?

19:53

Joseph ChoiThat's crazy. Yeah, I didn't know that uh this is one of the most highly monetized niches on the App Store. But it makes sense. I mean, people just want People love looking at their own face and making themselves look better. And AI is very good at doing that, and there's like a wow effect um with that.

20:11

Daniel HeintzmanI think the other reason why it does so well is the photo packs for us, like there's no cap to how much you can spend. And so I think that's another insight from the App Store is there's this topic of whales on the App Store, of people There's like certain people that will download an app and spend like thousands of dollars on an app. And I think that's a lot of how the big apps like Tinder, Hinge, Bumble make a lot of money is the people that There are a few people that like the top 1% are spending like the majority of they make up the majority of the revenue.

20:47

Joseph ChoiYeah, actually. Yeah, that makes sense. So if you give the people opportunity to buy consumables, they're you'll naturally have whales, right? That That's Yeah.

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Tags: ios, consumables, whales, ai-photos, uncapped-spend