Bickster · B2C · small app studio
Sell lifetime access instead of subscriptions unless the app has real running costs
Works well across their apps; subscriptions drew complaints on one
What they did
What happened
In their words
How He Built an $800K ARR App Using Simple Strategies
… than uh we started with so um the monetization works because it's we really we've tried to keep it so simple with this app it's a utility app i think you got to keep simple utility apps right um there's not a lot of onboarding and not a lot of emotion there's not a lot of like you know like a fitness app or some of these other apps you know that you you want to get kind of deep into the psyche of people um you know we we've done so many ab tests
on price free trials and this is what we've landed on right now this makes the most uh perth 1000k uh you know users at this point uh 59 lifetime and 39 either with a trial simple paywall uh lifetime i don't know if people do lifetimes but literally all of our is lifetime like they work so well right now yeah people don't like these subscriptions our bible app what i show you we tried subscriptions we get support all the time this is hey this is not a subscription right
i think this subscription is really there's something going on there uh that you should peel back and people should look at lifetime as a as an alternative for sure so you have 60 lifetime and 40 three-day trial yearly yep okay a little different from the screenshot but the screenshot showing some other oh i'm sorry yeah that's yeah yeah yeah my bad yep yep that was just a screenshot misprint sorry about that yeah 159 39 yes yes yes yep love um …
… mean, organic, you know, there's a lot of smart, organic people out there doing crazy stuff. You know, I mean, that's the Holy grail. Let's, let's face it. Right. And, you know, if you can get together with some organic or, you know, as an entrepreneur, do it yourself right figure it out right like there's tons of great stuff on twitter and whatnot to try to to scale organically right just that's how i started my business like i didn't know how
to market i didn't know how to do it i'm a software guy right right and i just figured it out right like i just dug into it and just didn't this is a bulldog and didn't stop until i figured it out right um so that's what i would advice i'd give to those people what do you when do you decide to move out of lifetime or do you just stay with lifetime for certain apps we always not always but most of our apps do lifetime sometimes financially like ai apps they don't make sense we can't give a lifetime to an ai app right that you know we're paying subscriptions to all the major um ai vendors right so um but apps that don't have that reoccurring cost extra reoccurring cost
um lifetime right it's just a way to go or have low ai usage like the ai like the bible app the costs are real the ai costs are so low that we can if we can do a lifetime right it's no big deal right okay yeah i love it you know what i should do is i'm gonna do what you just said i'm gonna go to the slide slide 18 and i'm gonna i'm gonna do this chris and i'll let you know we have an app that's doing fairly okay on the on aso i'm gonna hard paywallet now i'm just gonna do a one
time lifetime offer and i'm just gonna see how it goes and i'm i'm gonna run your playbook and i'll update everybody on this playbook but i really love the simplicity of this playbook i already know there's demand you know like we have a similar approach to building apps i know there's demand i know what the keyword should be i'm just gonna run it and then we're just gonna test a bunch of lifetime offers yeah yeah thank you for that yeah see …
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More from this episode
- Turn a $5.99 paid app into a free download with a subscriptionRevenue jumped from ~$200/day to ~$2,000/day overnight
- 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: lifetime-plan, subscription-fatigue