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
Workedpaywallonboarding
What they did
Life360 avoids adding friction to the free experience but keeps a paywall in onboarding: one extra screen that, if removed, would cut off a significant amount of new subscribers.
What happened
Guest says removing it would cut a significant amount of new subscribers.
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Freemium at Scale: Why Life360 Protects its Free Users – Giordano Contestabile“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.”
Related topics
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More from Life360
All 23 Life360 tactics- Sell only grouped location data, not raw GPS feeds, to a data partnerAbout $20M+ a year from Placer.ai; still some bad press
- Give daily location sharing away free and charge for safety featuresGrew to 80M+ active users and ~$400M revenue; about 1 in 8 families pay
- Show banner ads to free users and check harm with a holdout groupHoldout showed no harm; banners drive little performance and CEO wants them gone
- Don't charge anything until you reach 10 million active usersFounder says charging early would have killed them; no direct numbers
- Block ads for young users and let staff report bad ads in SlackGuest says it's been okay; a few bad ads still slip in
- Chase every possible battery or location bug, even if most are false alarms80-90% of chases are false alarms; old battery bugs still hurt trust
More from this episode
- Life360: 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
- Life360: 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
- Life360: Let every team, even finance and HR, run growth experiments with AI toolsWork in progress; no numbers given
- Life360: Track test speed, win rate and average win, and count inconclusive tests as failures
- Life360: 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
- Life360: Announce a pet feature with a cute animated dog that asks to be pettedCalled a huge success; many users made pet profiles; no numbers
- Life360: Add pet and aging-parent features so families keep using the app after kids leave
- Life360: 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
- Life360: Offer a free Tile tracker to people who subscribeHelps conversion for certain users; no numbers
- Life360: Give every software feature a great free version; charge for costly services
- Life360: 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
- Life360: Add in-app share buttons and gifted subscriptions to copy parents' word of mouthFailed across the board; parents don't share inside apps