---
title: Paywall before sign-up (account creation after purchase)
slug: paywall-before-signup
summary: Moving a forced sign-up screen after the paywall raised paywall views from 40% to 94%, trial starts +190% and sales +52% in a fitness app.
domain: mobile-apps
tags: [monetization, paywall, onboarding, signup, experiment]
related: [paywall-in-onboarding, multiple-paywalls-in-onboarding, better-sleep-onboarding-paywall-teardown, organic-first-growth-case-studies]
sources: [yt:vZXn_BSi5AE, yt:FWF_AbsR0qc]
updated: 2026-10-23
---

# Paywall before sign-up

## TL;DR
- Never put a mandatory sign-up between onboarding questions and the paywall.
- Fitness-app test: swap order to questions → hard paywall → hard sign-up.
- Paywall views 40% → 94% (60% were abandoning at sign-up); trial activations +190%; sales +52%.
- Calm does it: after starting a trial the only thing you can do is sign in.
- Steve has also seen registration-after-paywall perform better in other apps (e.g. Flow).

## Details
A fitness client had the usual flow: onboarding questions → **hard sign-up** (not skippable) → **hard paywall**. 60% of users dropped at the sign-up screen, so only 40% ever saw the paywall. Flipping the two screens (paywall first, sign-up second) raised paywall views to 94%, trial activations by 190% and sales by 52%.[^1]

Developer objection: "how will I link the purchase to the user?" — Calm shows it's solvable: once you start the trial you're immediately required to sign in.[^2] Purchases can be tied to an anonymous app-user ID (e.g. in RevenueCat) and aliased once the account exists.

Steve says his team has also seen sign-up placed after the paywall outperform sign-up before it; Flow (period tracker) asks for registration after the paywall and lets you skip it.[^3]

## Disagreements / caveats
- Social/multi-device apps that genuinely need an account before value might lose more from post-purchase sign-up friction; test it.

## See also
- [[paywall-in-onboarding]] — the "paywall views per first open" metric
- [[multiple-paywalls-in-onboarding]]

[^1]: yt:vZXn_BSi5AE @ 15:20 — Steve P. Young
[^2]: yt:vZXn_BSi5AE @ 16:12 — Steve P. Young
[^3]: yt:FWF_AbsR0qc @ 02:48 — Steve P. Young