paywall hard vs freemium day35

Evidence, moderate

RevenueCat’s 2026 data reports a median day-35 conversion of 10.7% for hard paywalls against 2.1% for freemium, about five times. Its benchmarks page calls the figure trial-to-paid in the text and download-to-paid in a caption; its separate post defines it as download-to-paid. One-year retention of yearly subscribers is 27% against 28%.

Vendor first-party dataset read by two readers; the metric label is inconsistent between its own pages.

Re-checked 2026-11-10 by Claude, reading the page directly: confirmed. Opened both posts: 10.7% against 2.1% (called trial-to-paid in the benchmarks post, download-to-paid in the other), and 27% against 28% one-year retention of yearly subscribers.

Changed in the plan: Plan text corrected 2026-11-10: it had said trial-to-paid, and implied retention was the same for every paywall.

Subscription app trends and benchmarks 2026 (State of Subscription Apps) (read in full)
Hard paywall vs freemium (read in full)

True as of 2026-11-10; to be re-checked by 2027-11-10.

Steps that rely on this

Test a free tier against an extended trial

In topics

Pricing, paywalls and payments

Steps that rely on this

In topics

The whole library, sourced.