Life360 · B2C · family location and safety app
Show the top-price plan on the paywall only to people a model predicts will buy it
Doubled new Platinum subscribers without losing a single Gold subscriber
Workedpaywallpricingexperimentation
What they did
Three tiers (Silver, Gold, Platinum); most users pick Gold and the paywall can't explain everything, so it normally leads with Gold. A machine-learning model using ~900 data points per user (profile, behavior, previous experiment results) predicts propensity to buy Platinum (wider roadside assistance range, identity protection, more services). High-propensity users are shown Platinum instead of Gold. Part of an ML targeting/orchestration layer built in the last year that also targets promotions, feature education, push notifications and in-app messages.
What happened
Share of new users subscribing to Platinum doubled with zero loss of Gold subscribers; the model found users who would not have bought Gold.
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Freemium at Scale: Why Life360 Protects its Free Users – Giordano Contestabile“And so we use machine learning to target platinum to people that we thought based on data, based on previous experiments, based on profile, we have about 900 data points that we use for that.”
“It doubled the percentage of new users that subscribing to platinum. So that was already very, very good. But it did that without losing a single gold subscriber, which was super surprising.”
“this machine learning layer orchestrates a lot of the things that the people see in the app in terms of paywalls and push notifications, in app messaging, et cetera, et cetera.”
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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
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- 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: Show one paywall screen during onboarding, even with a generous free planRemoving it would cut a significant share of new subscribers; 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