Life360 · B2C · family location and safety app
Show one paywall screen during onboarding, even with a generous free plan
Removing it would cut a significant share of new subscribers; no numbers
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Freemium at Scale: Why Life360 Protects its Free Users – Giordano Contestabile
David BarnardYeah. How do you think about that? How do you think about when to add friction to the free experience versus when to, like you said, just only think about adding value?
Giordano ContestabileWell, yeah. So adding friction to the free experience, we try not to. In Italy, in some cases you have to. For example, we have a paywall in onboarding like every other app. Sure, it does add one screen of friction, but not having that, we're aware of will cut off a significant amount of other new subscribers.
Giordano ContestabileWe have a feature that is a location history where you can look at for the last two days for free users where people in your circle were. Today's is more than enough for a lot of use cases. Usually people want to see what people were in the last day or so.
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More from this episode
- Keep 2 days of free location history even though cutting it doubled subscribersCutting to 6-12 hours doubled subs from that hook; not shipped to protect free users
- Show the top-price plan on the paywall only to people a model predicts will buy itDoubled new Platinum subscribers without losing a single Gold subscriber
- Let every team, even finance and HR, run growth experiments with AI toolsWork in progress; no numbers given
- Track test speed, win rate and average win, and count inconclusive tests as failures
- On day 2, nudge people to an unused feature using a family member's nameNo numbers; first-week activation strongly predicts users still around a year later
- Announce a pet feature with a cute animated dog that asks to be pettedCalled a huge success; many users made pet profiles; no numbers
- Add pet and aging-parent features so families keep using the app after kids leave
- Sell trackers at low margins to pull people into the app and keep them longerTile owners retain better than non-owners; Pet GPS requires a subscription
- Offer a free Tile tracker to people who subscribeHelps conversion for certain users; no numbers
- Give every software feature a great free version; charge for costly services
- Ship a 'just landed' alert, then partner with Uber to offer a ride on landingUber approached them; a broader Uber partnership is about to launch
- Add in-app share buttons and gifted subscriptions to copy parents' word of mouthFailed across the board; parents don't share inside apps
Tags: onboarding-paywall, freemium