An app ranking in search · B2C · host's own app
Put a hard paywall with one lifetime price on an app ranking in search
What they did
In their words
How He Built an $800K ARR App Using Simple Strategies
… 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 where you can go with it chris i got a personal question so you've been dealing with meta ads so we have a fitness app that's targeting more like the 65 and up.
Yeah. The, we do very well organically. So, and it is a yearly offer up around $40. I can't get Meta to work, Chris. We've got good hook rates. We've got good click-through rates, but nobody's buying from Meta. They're all buying when they search for something organically on the Apple App Store and ASA, but I can't get Meta to work. So we spent, you know, three, $5,000 on Meta, 150 bucks a day. I'm willing to spend. I just can't make it work. Any …
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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
- 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
- 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: hard-paywall, lifetime-plan