Test a free tier against an extended trial

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.

Step 4.4.7

Time: 10h

Evidence

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.

In topics

Pricing, paywalls and payments

Open in the launch plan

Evidence

In topics

The whole library, sourced.