Original Summary

Context: iOS alarm app, launched June 22, $5.99/mo, $29.99/yr with 7-day trial, $99.99 lifetime. ~$6,850 total ad spend across Reddit ($1,070), Meta ($1,276), Apple Ads ($2,115) and paid content creators ($2,138). ~$1,950 back so far, $1,330 through the app and $620 from a PDF front-end product. Fixing a bug tanked my revenue. My paywall had a rendering bug on mid-size iPhones, the yearly price was simply not visible. People saw the plan, the trial badge, the buy button. No price. That broken paywall converted at 10–12%, because around half of viewers tapped buy anyway, and a surprising number completed the purchase after Apple's payment sheet finally showed them the $29.99. I fixed the bug and conversion fell to 3%. Turns out my "real" paywall was just weak and the bug had been hiding it. Many iterations later (layout, plan presentation, trial framing, going from a 1-screen to a 3-screen paywall, the 3-screen variant is winning the live A/B test) it's at ~20% with the price visible. Meanwhile my onboarding, an 18-screen quiz, completed at 70–80% the whole time. The leak was not where everyone tells you to look. Adding a cheap plan lowered total conversion. I A/B tested adding a weekly plan through RevenueCat experiments. The outcome I expected was cannibalization, people take the weekly and churn fast. The actual outcome: almost nobody bought the weekly, but the variant that showed it converted worse across the board. Just the presence of the option hurt. I have theories (harder decision, anchoring in the wrong direction), but the data said kill it, so it's dead. I would have argued against this result before running the test. The ads that also work don't sell my app. Meta traffic sent to web funnels for the app converted nobody. The same audience sent to a $37 PDF (adjacent problem, same buyer) runs at about breakeven on the front end. Sounds like nothing, until you add the backend: a $17 order bump at checkout, then an upsell to the app's lifetime plan at 25% off ($74 instead of $99) through my web paywall, so no App Store commission. Two lifetime sales so far from PDF buyers at zero extra ad cost. Email upsells and abandoned checkout emails went live a few days ago, no data yet. This backend margin is what pulled the last two weeks to overall profitable. On top of this I've also price tested everything at 2x. Conversions to trial stayed almost as is, at one point in time I've already imagined buying a yacht (lol). After 2 weeks of experiment – no one converted from trial to paid at 2x the price. Most cancelled in the first couple of seconds after starting the trial. If you're pre-launch, take one thing from this: your paywall is worth more iterations than your ad creative. The same traffic went from 3% to 20% and I did not touch the campaigns. Questions welcome. P.S. Full story with all the dashboards is in a video , there's also more detail there.   submitted by   /u/EfficientLetter3654 [

中文概览

中文标题： $6/月消费应用两个月付费获客：3个意外结果

iOS闹钟应用，$5.99/月，广告支出约$6850，回收约$1950；付费墙渲染bug使年价不可见时转化10–12%，修复后降至3%，多次迭代后约20%；加入周计划反而拉低整体转化；Meta流量导至网页漏斗无人转化，同一受众导至$37 PDF约打平，后端加价购与终身计划upsell助近两周盈利；2倍价格测试无人从试用转付费。

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：讨论应用付费获客、定价测试与付费墙转化，属商业与市场研究。
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/9/17 21:27:29