“We saw a 75% increase in LTV per user through the implementation of this multi-step paywall along with some other pricing and packaging optimizations which has pretty fundamentally altered the full potential size of this business.”

Multi-step paywall drove a 75% LTV lift — freemium is chess while hard paywall is checkers

Carter's biggest win of the year was helping a client shift from a hard paywall to a multi-step paywall: 'this product is free and always will be free, but try the best version for 7 days.' The result was a 75% LTV increase per user. He cautions this is harder to execute than a hard paywall (checkers vs chess) and can backfire — another client saw 50%+ subscriber conversion drop when they tried it. The freemium switch works when strong organic acquisition exists to fill the larger top-of-funnel it requires.