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

• Why the paywall belongs in onboarding — the “paywall views per first open” metric
• Showing two paywalls in onboarding (and the 8-paywall-views rule)

Footnotes

1. We’ve Tested 100s of Paywalls. Here’s What Actually Converts. @ 15:20 — Steve P. Young ↩

2. We’ve Tested 100s of Paywalls. Here’s What Actually Converts. @ 16:12 — Steve P. Young ↩

3. App Monetization Tactics No One Is Talking About @ 02:48 — Steve P. Young ↩