GTM Sauce

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

Workedpricing

What they did

Most Bickster apps sell lifetime access. Use lifetime unless the app has real recurring costs (e.g. heavy AI API usage); low-AI-usage apps like the Bible app can still do lifetime. On the Bible app, subscriptions generated support complaints.

What happened

Lifetime 'works so well right now' across their apps.

In their words

How He Built an $800K ARR App Using Simple Strategies

Play from 12:20

… 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

12:20

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

12:51

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

41:43

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

42:19

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

42:49

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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Tags: lifetime-plan, subscription-fatigue