Fitbit to Apple Health Sync · B2C · Fitbit sync utility
Turn a $5.99 paid app into a free download with a subscription
Revenue jumped from ~$200/day to ~$2,000/day overnight
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- mature app (~5 years old)
In their words
How He Built an $800K ARR App Using Simple Strategies
… to kind of pay some of this forward and to hopefully this helps any small developers or anybody kind of understand what it takes to to get to this level and get to this point and I'll actually break down the journey too so it's just not all kind of academic right so this app you know like you said you know almost seven six million dollars you know over the last 10 years you know 10 years we did since 2021 was the big growth this is where we
flipped the app it was a paid app 599 and then one day we said let's make a subscription app and literally overnight in December, we went from like $200 a day to $2,000 a day just by making a subscription app. And then we raised the price to a lifetime price. So that was the big game changer for this app. We didn't realize the goldmine we were sitting on and how valuable this was to users to get their data into Apple Health. So that was a big, big win for us. You know, here's some conversion notes here. You know, we have a, you know, impression to
install rate about six percent um yeah yeah so you know this is this is a really good uh rate you know something you can uh measure on um you know this the five percent to one percent is also uh install to purchase we have about six percent installed purchase rate uh five percent are up front one percent is kind of on the back end you know after they close we have a soft paywall which you know i know is you can argue is a some apps are good some …
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More from this episode
- Sell lifetime access instead of subscriptions unless the app has real running costsWorks well across their apps; subscriptions drew complaints on one
- Offer $59.99 lifetime or $39.99/year with a 3-day trial on a closable paywall~6% of installs buy; best revenue per 1,000 users of the variants tested
- Keep installs about half organic, half paid; fund only channels returning 2-3xOn track for ~110K MRR
- Use Apple Search Ads only if the cost per install fits your numbersBest paid channel for this app; too pricey for many of their others
- Run Google and Bing search ads and feed sales back to them every nightTwo of the three main paid channels; Bing small but profitable
- Test a one-screen landing page against sending search clicks straight to the App StoreDepends on the app; no general rule
- Test lifetime prices from $4.99 up to $49.99 at fixed ad spend to find the ceiling$29.99 beat $49.99 on day-one revenue; a later $39.99 now beats $29.99
- Build quick AI-coded versions of several app ideas; keep the one that sells
- Spin off an AI Bible app for chat users who asked religious questionsSold at $29.99 lifetime with little effort; ads near break-even
- Launch with a hard paywall, one offer and no free trialOne offer gave the clearest pricing lessons
- Test with exact-keyword Apple Search Ads, then scale on MetaMeta converted even better than Apple Search Ads
- Set Meta ads to find buyers, not installs, and test videos at ~$500/dayInstall-to-purchase rose from ~6% to ~18-20%
- Title the App Store page with plain search terms and put the brand last
- Test app icons first, including wildly different versionsGuest says icons move conversion most; no numbers
- Test dropping the onboarding screens entirelyNo onboarding won in several apps; even one welcome screen hurt
- Use Adapty to change prices and paywalls without an app update
- Show one offer on the paywall with a 'view all plans' link
- Lay out paywall plans side by side instead of stacked~2 points higher conversion (guest unsure of the exact number)
- Skip paid attribution tools; use Meta's own numbers, in-house tracking and Mixpanel
- Put a hard paywall with one lifetime price on an app ranking in search
- Run Meta ads at ~$150/day for a fitness app for people 65+Nobody bought after $3-5K; buyers came from App Store search
Tags: paid-to-subscription, lifetime-plan