Hard paywall to freemium with a multistep paywall: +75% LTV per user
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsAn established subscription app replaced its hard paywall with a free version and a multistep paywall, and LTV per user rose 75%.
Growth advisor Phil Carter (Elemental Growth) ran it with the app's team, and it was published on the RevenueCat blog.
Pricing and packaging changed at the same time, so the lift can't be pinned on the paywall alone.
- LTV per user: +75%, measured across the full change.
- The source says the wider free funnel brought more users into the core product and sped up organic acquisition. No figures were given for that.
- Sample size, duration, conversion rates and test design were not shared.
The change
Pay-to-enter hard paywall vs free plan with a multistep trial invitation
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
A hard paywall: users had to pay before using the core product.
Variant
The app went freemium. A multistep onboarding paywall told users the product is free for good, invited them to try the best version for seven days, then asked them to keep paying for it. Other pricing and packaging changes shipped alongside.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Taking away the hard gate let far more people use the product, which grew the base that could convert later.
- Framing the trial as a taste of the best version, with a free plan as the fallback, likely felt lower-risk than pay-or-leave.
- The pricing and packaging changes may have raised revenue per payer on their own.
Caveats: Bundled with pricing and packaging changes, and the test design was not described. The same switch failed badly for another of Phil Carter's clients.
Who ran it
Phil Carter ran this test. Source: RevenueCat blog. The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
How to run this test on your app
- Hypothesis
- If we offer a permanent free plan and use a multistep paywall to invite users into a 7-day trial of premium, then LTV per user will rise because more people reach the core product and the best-fit users still upgrade.
- Primary metric
- LTV per install (not just per payer)
- Guardrails
- Install-to-paid conversion
- Trial-to-paid conversion
- Retention of free and paid users
- Who should test it
- Mature apps with strong product-market fit and retention, runway to absorb a dip, and the analytics to tune feature gating. Bootstrapped apps that rely on cash from paid acquisition should probably keep the hard paywall.
Questions
Is freemium better than a hard paywall?
Not by default. RevenueCat's own data shows hard paywalls convert downloads to paid far better on median, and a second app that tried this switch saw subscriber conversion fall by more than half.
What is a multistep paywall?
A paywall spread over several screens, often inside onboarding, that explains value and the trial before asking for payment.
Here it also made clear the free plan stays available.
Which metric should decide a freemium test?
LTV per install or user, plus retention. Conversion rate alone will usually drop when you add a free plan, even when the business grows.
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