Price testing tactics

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.

After many A/B tests on price and free trials, landed on a simple soft paywall with minimal onboarding (utility app, no emotional build-up): $59.99 lifetime and $39.99/year with a 3-day free trial.

Launched at $19.99/month and $129/year, both with free trials, and saw poor conversion. A/B tested price packages with RevenueCat; landed on $14.99/month with no free trial, paid upfront, alongside $99/year with a 7-day trial.

Instead of the 14- or 30-day trials common in fitness apps, the $99 annual plan (down from $129) has a 7-day free trial, meant to push users to try the app quickly and commit.

Launched at $6.99/month without much research. As soon as RevenueCat Experiments came out, tested many monthly prices from $4.99 up to $19.99. $12.49 had the highest LTV lift; $14.99 was slightly higher but they chose $12.49 to keep reach broad because parent-to-parent word of mouth matters in kids apps. Ran look-backs over multiple years: some higher prices gave an early LTV boost that did not hold.

After reading reviews where users asked to pay to remove ads, tested a one-time purchase of 30 ad-free days at $3, $5 and $10 instead of a subscription.

Raised the weekly subscription from $3/week to $9/week (weekly and monthly plans only, no annual).

New app sells only monthly and annual plans. Raised both by 20%; now testing a further 20% increase.

Held $39.99/year from 2012 while testing constantly up and down the demand curve ($5 to $120/year); no price beat $40 consistently. In late 2024, with phones and competitors getting pricier, retested a higher price: net revenue broke even for the first time. Re-ran on iOS and Android and on new, existing and reactivated user cohorts with similar results, then rolled out ~$80/year (competitors' level) to new users in 2026. Rationale: rising CACs (incl. Meta restricting health and wellness ads) and AI feature costs; at $40 it is much harder to hit the ROAS needed to ramp paid acquisition.

For price tests, tracked the 7-day cancellation rate as a proxy for renewal rate. When a higher price won on new revenue, modeled a year of revenue at that price using the proxy; the higher price's cancellation rate was far above baseline, so kept the original price.

Plus subscription had been $39/year (same SKU for Frame and Calendar). Asked what a Calendar-only company would charge, then ran a batch of variants varying both the subscription price and the hardware discount when bought together (tracking hardware conversion, margin per unit and subscription attach). $99 maximized revenue slightly in the spreadsheet, but surveys, one-on-one conversations and focus groups showed $99 was near 'disgust / not worth it yet' territory, so they chose $79 as a middle ground they were confident in, keeping room to go up later as more value is added. Applied to new customers only (see t2).

Early price test raised the price to $129 (from $99/yr per the launch pricing); kept it for most of the app's life. Team always had some experiment running.