Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
9 tactics from Sylvain Gauchet
Building More Successful Paywalls in Subscription Apps
Watch the full episode“Get your users excited about your product by telling the story through the flows that present the paywall. Think about the user mindset when they open the app and the story you reveal to them through the onboarding so that when they see the paywall it's contextualized.”
The screen before the paywall matters more than the paywall itself
Sylvain reframes paywall optimization: the paywall is the ask of the sale, but the onboarding is the pitch. Optimizing the paywall in isolation leaves the biggest lever untouched. Apps like Rise Sleep and 222 invest hard in the opening hook and narrative arc so that by the time pricing appears, it feels earned.
“Have onboarding questions, then a generic paywall, then more questions related to specific premium features, or even have users set up those premium features, then have a feature paywall and say these are part of the Premium plan. If they don't get it you explain to them everything they're going to lose.”
Loss aversion: let users configure premium features before showing the paywall
Users invest effort building out a premium setup during onboarding, then hit a paywall that explicitly threatens to wipe what they just configured. The sunk-cost feeling does the persuasion that the first generic paywall couldn't. The second 'lose everything you set up' paywall is what actually converts the holdouts.
“A comparison of basic versus Pro Plan, this can be done for long scrollable screen or multiscreen paywall, and this is from Catarina who was at Mimo and she was mentioning that at Mimo the multiscreen option led to 60% increase in the trial opt-in rate.”
Multiscreen paywalls beat long-scroll: Mimo saw a 60% trial uplift
Long paywalls only get scrolled by explorers, and plans often fall below the fold. Breaking the same content into three or four sequenced screens lets each message land and keeps pricing visible. Especially effective for free-trial flows where each screen can explain day 2, day 5, etc. This is an easy A/B test against any existing long paywall.
“The conversion behavior of users during onboarding and post onboarding is different, so you probably want a different build for the two. When you AB test your paywall, separate the analysis between the onboarding paywall and the post onboarding paywalls.”
A/B test onboarding paywalls separately from post-onboarding paywalls
A free-vs-paid comparison chart can hurt the first paywall but help a later one shown after a user hits a gated feature — they already know free. Treating both contexts as one test averages out opposite effects, hiding the real signal. Caveat: ~80% of conversions happen on the day-one paywall, so this segmentation only pays off past roughly $100K/month.
“You saw a specific feature, you click on it, you get a paywall specific to that content. If you don't unlock it you reiterate everything else you can get with premium, and if they close it then you have an IAP to give them access just to that one feature.”
Cascade: feature paywall → premium recap → one-time IAP fallback
A three-layer flow walks users down the demand curve: contextual feature paywall, then a 'here's everything else premium unlocks' second pitch, then a one-off in-app purchase for just the triggering feature. Captures users who reject subscription but will pay once. Google data shows hybrid monetization is a major unlock Android apps already exploit and iOS lags on.
“Same thing goes with anything — you're price-testing to death and haven't tested anything else, you're missing out, so you need to go in areas where you don't have diminishing returns or where you have big opportunities.”
Stop price-testing to death — test where diminishing returns haven't hit yet
Teams over-index on price A/B tests because they're easy to ship through RevenueCat, but price is usually the lowest-leverage variable once you've squeezed it. Bigger wins sit upstream in onboarding hook, paywall structure, and feature-triggered placements. Prioritize tests by where the curve still has slope.
“If somebody walks into a golf shop they would expect somebody to walk up and say hey what are you interested in today. That's not annoying. But then if you say oh no I'm just browsing and they follow you around the store, that's awkward.”
Roleplay user conversations to spot used-car-salesman tactics
Free-trial toggles, wheel-of-fortune offers, and backup offers all measurably lift conversion but stack into a used-car-salesman feel that raises churn and damages brand. The fix is roleplaying user reactions to each onboarding screen: if a feature would feel pushy from a salesperson in a store, it reads the same in-app.
“You take Calm's implementation of kind of the daily gift — you have a meditation bowl and you have to go with your finger around the bowl and that kind of triggers the spinning the wheel motion but there's no wheel, it's very much in line with the concept of meditating.”
Gamified offers must match the app's metaphor — Calm vs Endel
Endel's apple-in-tree discount mini-game felt disconnected and confusing inside a focus-sounds app. Calm reuses the singing-bowl gesture as the 'spin' mechanic, so the gamified discount reinforces the brand's meditation metaphor instead of breaking it. Same tactic, opposite brand outcome based on implementation.
“If you're starting, if you're early stage, if you're not super sophisticated, you probably don't want to bother with that because chances are you have 80% of your conversions on the first day paywall and diving into optimizing the remaining 20% is probably not the best effort.”
Below $100K/month, don't bother with sophisticated paywall optimization
Splitting onboarding vs post-onboarding paywall analysis, hybrid monetization, and price testing all have diminishing returns when you're small. Below ~$100K/month, focus on bigger swings in onboarding and positioning. These sophisticated optimizations help scale from $100K to $1M, not zero to one.