No free trial and six paid tiers: LTV per payer $35–40 to $60+
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsA new subscription app removed its free trial and moved to six paid tiers, and LTV per paying customer rose from $35–40 to over $60 within a month.
David Vargas, who managed the app's paid campaigns, ran the change and wrote it up on the RevenueCat blog.
It was a before/after switch with new pricing, not a split test.
- LTV per paying customer: from $35–40 to over $60 in about a month, close to double.
- New trials fell to zero, as expected, and paid campaigns moved from optimizing for trials to optimizing for purchases.
- The author expects cost per acquisition to rise on purchase-optimized campaigns. No CPA or conversion figures were shared.
- Before the change the app had a 15.5% start rate and 37.9% conversion rate.
The change
Two plans with a weekly trial vs six feature-based tiers and no trial
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
A simple paywall with two plans: a yearly plan with no trial and a weekly plan with a free trial. The setup matched competitors in the niche.
Variant
A paywall with six tiers and no free trial: three monthly and three yearly options that differed by features. The yearly prices were higher than the old yearly plan.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Users ready to pay did so up front, instead of churning out of a weekly trial.
- Monthly tiers were priced to beat four weekly renewals on LTV, and yearly prices went up.
- Ad platforms learned to find buyers rather than trial starters.
Caveats: A before/after switch over about two months (Nov–Dec 2024), not a split test, and pricing and plan structure changed at the same time. LTV per payer can rise while the number of payers falls, and CPA likely went up.
Who ran it
David Vargas 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 remove the free trial and offer feature-based monthly and yearly tiers, then LTV per paying customer will rise because committed users pay sooner on higher-value plans.
- Primary metric
- LTV per install (and per paying customer)
- Guardrails
- Install-to-paid conversion
- Cost per acquisition
- Refund rate
- Who should test it
- Paid-acquisition apps in crowded niches where trials draw many non-payers and you need LTV to cover ad spend. Apps whose value needs time to show, or that grow organically, may lose more payers than they gain.
Questions
Will removing a free trial always raise LTV?
No. Here it came with new tiers and higher prices, and it was not a split test.
Fewer people may buy, so compare LTV per install, not just per payer.
How does dropping the trial change paid ads?
Campaigns can optimize for purchases instead of trial starts, which teaches the platform to find buyers.
Expect a higher CPA and the need for bigger daily budgets.
What should we try after removing the trial?
The author suggests testing prices on the no-trial paywall, improving onboarding and refining ad creatives for paying users.