Consumers have subscription fatigue. With streaming apps like Peacock looking to increase prices, Netflix floating the idea of including ads, and seemingly every other app looking to monetize through subscriptions, apps know that the more time users spend deliberating their subscriptions, the less likely they are to pull the trigger.
This verdict almost always comes the moment they hit a critical spot in their app experience: The paywall. It’s here that they make a snap decision to move beyond a free trial and into payment–and the paywall experience itself can disproportionately impact this decision.
While that’s pretty much the extent of most people’s thinking about paywalls, app monetization company RevenueCat, which powers monetization for one in every three consumer apps — including ChatGPT, VSCO and Notion — has spent the last two years thinking about every single aspect of building, testing, and deploying them, as well as the relationship between that process and a significantly increased paid subscriber base. Their approach goes way beyond getting the price, color, and form fields right.
According to RevenueCat’s CEO, Jacob Eiting, “Your paywall is your app’s sales pitch — it’s make or break for monetization.”
With 80% of all free trials starting on day one of download, RevenueCat knows that if an app fails to convert a user in those first moments, the chances they’ll become a subscriber decrease exponentially. It also knows that for major apps, optimizing paywalls can require testing thousands of versions of paywalls.
Each version, whether an overhaul of the entire page or a minor tweak, typically requires submitting an update to app stores for review. We’ve seen this year how long app stores can take to approve apps, with Fortnite’s return to iOS being stalled for 100 hours.
While most apps don’t wait in purgatory for that long, app store review processes, whether on Apple, Google, Amazon, or otherwise, act as serious barriers to agility for apps. The process of constantly resubmitting paywall variations slows down experimentation cycles by days or even weeks, creating a significant bottleneck to revenue creation and optimization. It can take years with this cadence to perfect subscription offerings.
So, RevenueCat is now changing this by bypassing the app store review process altogether, and solving a whole lot of other issues that stand in the way of conversions, with the launch of its no-code Paywall Builder.
The tool allows app creators to remotely design, modify, and test paywalls, without any needed code changes to live apps. To anyone not in the paywall game, this might sound seriously wonky. To those that are, it’s a game-changer.
Here’s a brief look at what this thing does if you’re in the latter group.
App creators are used to testing one paywall version at a painfully slow pace. Now, app teams can test multiple, personalized variations of paywalls on different target audiences simultaneously, on their live app.
Changes on everything from pricing and messaging to visuals can also be made in real time, and shipped or rolled back instantly if necessary. Because they don’t need to make code changes, developers and non-developers alike can streamline the process of experimentation, minimizing roadblocks and scaling their subscriber base more quickly.
While major app teams might have the time and money to build and test thousands of paywall versions, app stores are composed of thousands of apps that don’t. But these apps know that the bigger players are investing in their paywalls and often look to learn from what they’ve built. RevenueCat is aiding this with an expansive library of paywall templates that app creators can mimic in full, within minutes, or borrow even just a few pieces from, thanks to the modular architecture of its templates. For many, these templates will serve as starting points and building blocks, including text, images, and buttons, that they can customize however they want or use as is.
Those who want to dream up their paywalls from scratch have full creative license and the ability to create multiple versions of their own designs with drag-and-drop functionality.
“One of the most impactful ways we can help app builders make money is by giving teams an intuitive and flexible way to build, test, and ship high-converting paywalls — without the usual bottlenecks around coding and app store reviews,” added Eiting.
The new paywalls feature is being put to the test by developers around the globe as they compete in RevenueCat’s “World Paywall Speed Building Championships.” The virtual competition challenges participants to recreate real-world paywalls as quickly and accurately as possible.
RevenueCat Paywalls is now available to all 50,000+ of RevenueCat’s current user base, as well as any app creator as a standalone capability.
