App pricing tactics

When PadSplit sources the resident for a host's unit, it keeps the first 10 days of that stay to recover a good portion of the marketing cost of finding them, then takes 8% of every ongoing rent payment. It only gets paid when the host gets paid, which the founder pitches to hosts as the key difference from lead-selling 'demand aggregators' like Zillow, realtor.com or apartments.com, where landlords pay for leads.

'Proof of pay': ship a real app with a simple onboarding and a hard paywall showing one offer, submit every price you want to test up front, and run Apple Search Ads at the same daily spend (~$1K/day to learn fast; far less works over a longer period). Change only the lifetime price, walking it up: $4.99, $9.99, $29.99, $49.99. Read results directionally (day-one revenue per user), not for statistical significance. If you can't get past ~$4.99, drop or change the concept.

Prompted by members asking for a family plan. The web quiz asks 'Do you have a gym buddy? Would you like to add them onto your plan?' Both users get 15% off. Those who decline see only a small gym buddy toggle on the pricing page, keeping the paywall simple. Buddies can see each other's workouts and meals and send nudges in the app.

Before: monthly and annual shown side by side. Variant: only the annual plan shown up front, with a Blinkist-style timeline above it: Day 1 you get your personalized plan; Day 7 your plan adapts to you; Day 12, before the 14-day free trial ends, 'we'll send you a reminder' and you can cancel anytime. Monthly is reachable via a 'view all plans' link. Price and positioning unchanged; UI-only change.

'Design your trial' soft paywall: two annual plans with different App Store Connect introductory offers, so the choice is the trial, not the plan length. Option A: free trial (3 or 7 days). Option B: 30-day pay-up-front intro offer at $3.99-$5.99 (seen $7.99 work; $2.99 or lower fails). CTA text changes with the selection ('Redeem 3 days for $0' / '30 days for $4.99'); show the renewal annual price (even in the plan selectors, performs just as well); update the timeline for the paid trial; still send a reminder near day 28. Often combined with the multi-page paywall.

Trigger the offer on transaction abandon (user tapped the CTA, then closed Apple's payment sheet), not on paywall close. Offer a longer trial (3-day -> 7-day, or 7 -> 14) renewing at the standard price, with copy like 'Need more time to decide? How about an extended 7-day trial on us?'. Show it in a drawer modal or a screen with a back button so users can always escape. Apple allows one-time offers but not nagging, and dislikes a cheaper ('better') offer right after the first paywall; a different intro offer at the same renewal price is more likely approved than a discount.

No margin on hardware: armband ~$80 (wholesale cost). Membership $20/month or $14.99/month on an annual plan. Told openly to users that the value is in the app. Chosen over Oura's model (expensive device, cheap subscription) and WHOOP's (hardware folded into a pricier membership), closer to Tractive's.

Couldn't outrank an app for a keyword wanted for a client, downloaded it and saw it was undermonetized: #1 for two keywords with ~28 and ~34 search volume, 100-150 downloads/day, one-time $2-3 price, no onboarding paywall. Benchmarked price on a similar client app doing ~$1M ARR at $60/year. Bought it (2022), added onboarding and a paywall (mid-May), went fully hard paywall with a trial at $60/year in June. No new features and no extra downloads.

Two yearly options on the paywall: yearly at $59.99 with a 7-day free trial, and a paid intro offer of $1.99 for the first 30 days that renews at the $59.99 yearly price, replacing the monthly plan. Steve says it works well for most clients; Resumee uses it too.

To justify paying upfront without a trial, asked the app's high-ticket coach (Natalie) to run one monthly group coaching call for every member, included in the membership. Added a single onboarding screen announcing live coaching; nothing else changed (same prices, one variable). Ran as a long Adapty split test until statistically significant.

Starting from $12.99 monthly / $29.99 quarterly / $59.99 annual, split tested monthly at $14.99 with the rest unchanged. Goal is to shift the plan mix to annual, which had the highest LTV in the previous app.

Took the winning paywall and split tested monthly $14.99 -> $19.99 and quarterly $29.99 -> $39.99 with annual held at $59.99, so annual is only ~$20 more than quarterly (about $5/month). Courage came from an accident: after the earlier $12.99 -> $14.99 test he forgot to update the Apple price, which had been $19.99, and iOS monthly conversion hadn't suffered. Now rolled out on both platforms.