Weather Up · B2C · weather app with widgets
Launch a weather app at $40 a year with no launch sale
Close to 2,000 subscribers, but press readers balked at $40 next to a $30 competitor
Mixedpricing
What they did
Single tier at $4/month or $40/year (annual only ~17% off, to keep monthly revenue for monthly API costs). Price was set from his own view of the product's value and the cost of serving multi-source widgets that refresh in the background, not from customers' perceived value or competitor prices. No discount at launch, and most articles listed the $40 price.
What happened
Got thousands of subscribers, proving some willingness to pay a premium, but he believes the price hurt conversion from press traffic; would have launched at $30 with a launch discount to $19.99.
- Stage
- launch
“So, this is the advice I would have, if you are going to do a big attention-grabbing thing, do it with some kind of a discount, 25% off, 50% off, whatever, because all that attention I did get, most of the people who wrote about it listed the price.”
“I think we probably should have done 30 and then done a discount to 19.99 for the launch.”
“I priced based on things that I knew and based on my thinking of the value of Weather Up and my costs in servicing Weather Up, not on the customer-perceived value of Weather Up.”
Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from Weather Up
All 12 Weather Up tactics- Ship a big update that gets featured by Apple and the press~$100K in the update year with almost no ads; halved the next year without updates
- When someone leaves a hard paywall, send a push offering 7 free daysFew took it and few of those paid; being replaced
- Pull Google AdSense ads and move to a hard paywall with a 7-day trialAds caused bad reviews and complaints; app lost money for ~a year without them
- Let people close the paywall, give them 7 free days, then lock the app
More from this episode
- Weather Up: Pitch journalists with a short demo video in a Twitter DMCovered by TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacRumors and BGR, even by writers who rarely cover apps
- Weather Up: Hold new features back for one big launch to get attentionDownloads fell to ~15 a day during the 4-year wait; guest calls it a big regret
- Weather Up: Launch just before Vision Pro ships to avoid 'where's your Vision Pro app?'Landed an hour before Apple's DMA news; fewer articles, no social buzz, no Apple feature
- Weather Up: Relaunch with one or two new features and a limited-time sale
- Weather Up: Pre-select the yearly plan on the paywall, not the monthly oneMonthly default got ~10% more subscribers but 60% lower revenue per user in month one
- Weather Up: Put a feature demo video on the paywall, with hosted price buttons belowWent better than expected; built in under a day; guest gives no numbers
- Weather Up: Test $40 against $39.99 for the yearly plan
- Build a mirror app and rank for the word 'mirror' in the App StoreCaptured 6-8K of 10-20K daily 'mirror' searches at peak
- Make a $0.99 app free and sell themes plus a $10 bundleMany bought the $10 bundle; earned $10 a sale instead of $0.99
- Contrast: Buy ads for paid-upfront appsLost money; spent thousands of dollars in the early App Store
- Contrast: Give developers a revenue share instead of paying them by the hourStopped losing money on stalled projects; partners working on the side ship slowly
- Launch Center Pro: Save features for big paid-app launches that spike revenueUp to $60K in a launch week vs hundreds of dollars a day otherwise
- Dark Noise: Add interactive widgets when iOS 17 ships to land in Apple's listsPicked first in an editorial list; 'massively impactful', no numbers; other lists did little
- RevenueCat: Launch again and again, dressing up each fundraise as a launchFirst Reddit post got some traction; no numbers