Pricing, paywalls and payments

Price, packaging and the paywall shape acquisition cost, churn and support for years, so test them deliberately. Make it possible to pay, state the price, and raise it for new customers before you discount.

19 steps, about 72 hours of work · 2 plays · 4 checked claims

The concept, explained in full: Product marketing.

Do it

The steps from the launch plan that belong to this topic, in plan order.

Make the offer legible in five seconds

Publish plans with real numbers1h
Hiding price filters out exactly the self-serve buyers you can actually win at this stage.
Add an FAQ block with FAQPage schema45m
Kills the top objections and feeds answer extraction in AI search at the same time.

Make it possible to pay you

Take one real charge in live mode1h
Charge yourself a dollar. Test mode hides at least one real failure, always.
Complete checkout on a phone20m
Most of your launch-day traffic arrives on mobile, from a link in a feed.
Turn on failed-payment emails30m
Involuntary churn is the cheapest revenue you will ever recover. Switch it on now.
Handle sales tax and VAT1h
Stripe Tax, or a merchant of record. Decide once; retrofitting is genuinely painful.
State the refund and cancellation policy20m
EU customers can cancel within 14 days by law, so the policy has to say so; for instant access, ask at checkout for their express agreement to give that right up. Our view, not a measured result: a plain, visible policy costs less in refunds than it earns in trust.

Convert the traffic you already have

Test a free tier against an extended trial10h
This decision shapes your CAC, your churn and your support load for years. In RevenueCat’s 2026 app data a hard paywall converts about five times freemium at day 35 (10.7% against 2.1%; its benchmarks post calls that trial-to-paid and its paywall post calls it download-to-paid), with the same one-year retention for yearly subscribers (27% against 28%). Trials of 17–32 days convert about 70% better than three-day trials. Test it deliberately.

Grow revenue per customer

Compare seats, usage and workspaces against what your best customers grow on2h
Look at your ten largest accounts. The thing that grew with them is the metric.
Track the chosen metric per account4h
You cannot price what you do not measure. Start recording before you change anything.
Set the limit where value is felt, not where it hurts1h
A limit that blocks the first success loses the account. Put it after a customer has had a win.
Ship the billing and the in-product path to buy more10h
Buying more must take two clicks at the moment of need, not a sales call.
Introduce annual plans with a real discount10h
Two months free is the norm. It buys cash up front and a year of churn protection.
Prompt upgrades at the value moment10h
Immediately after a success in-product, never on a billing anniversary.
Raise prices for new customers and watch8h
Grandfather everyone existing. Almost every product at this stage is underpriced.
List what each tier includes and which feature drives each upgrade2h
Use upgrade history, not opinion. The feature people upgrade for is the one the tier should sell.
Redraw the tiers around the value metric1h
Each step up grows the metric. Remove feature checklists that do not map to it.
Test the new tiers on new customers only8h
Two weeks of new signups on the new page. Compare conversion and average revenue against the old.
Announce to existing customers with a grandfather date2h
Tell them early, keep their price for a stated period, and say what they gain by moving.

Plays

Reusable patterns that explain how: backed by read sources first, then practitioner advice, then our own ideas.

Announce the price rise for new customers, with a date, before you raise itBacked · 1 source
Before raising your price, email trial users and free accounts that the price rises for new customers on a fixed date, and that anyone who subscribes before then keeps today’s price. The date turns a vague "later" into a decision, existing customers stay on their old price, and you learn at once whether the new price holds.
The "how much does it cost" page competitors won’t writeOur idea
Publish an honest "how much does [category] cost" page: real price ranges, the factors that move them, and when the budget option is enough. Buyers searching cost are close to a decision, most vendors dodge the question, and the page that answers it plainly wins the click and the trust.

What the evidence says

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.

Sources

Where it sits in the plan

1.2.3Publish a real pricing pagein Ship-ready
1.5Make it possible to pay youin Ship-ready
4.4.7Test a free tier against an extended trialin Find the one channel that works
6.2Grow revenue per customerin Scale to $1M ARR