---
title: Why the paywall belongs in onboarding
slug: paywall-in-onboarding
summary: Most subscription buyers convert on day zero, so the paywall should sit inside the first-run onboarding and be seen by ~100% of new users.
domain: mobile-apps
tags: [monetization, paywall, onboarding, conversion]
related: [hard-vs-soft-paywalls, paywall-before-signup, multiple-paywalls-in-onboarding, three-screen-pre-paywall-sequence, app-design-for-conversion-and-ux]
sources: [yt:vZXn_BSi5AE, yt:bg0_DavI-DE, yt:2soA7LyyQ64, yt:SHctL0V73BE]
updated: 2026-10-23
---

# Why the paywall belongs in onboarding

## TL;DR
- Put a paywall at the end of onboarding, before the user ever reaches the app's main screen.
- Goal: first open → paywall view as close to 100% as possible.
- Second-best placement is the home/main screen; everything else is a distant third.
- Low sales with very few downloads is a traffic problem, not a paywall problem — don't rip the paywall out.
- Paying users engage more, so an onboarding paywall can lift retention, not just revenue.

## Details
RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps report (cited by Steve in 2026) shows that nearly all trial starts happen on day zero, across all categories; users who don't start a trial immediately rarely start one later.[^1] Steve's estimate is that 60–80% of everyone who ever buys does so during onboarding, before using the core app; the homepage is the second-best paywall location.[^2] He treats this as table stakes and says adding it will "instantly" increase revenue for apps that don't do it.[^3]

The practical metric is **paywall views per first open**: remove anything that causes users to drop before the paywall (forced sign-up, permission walls, health integrations — see [[paywall-before-signup]] and [[better-sleep-onboarding-paywall-teardown]]). More paywall views compound: see [[multiple-paywalls-in-onboarding]] for the "~8 views before diminishing returns" benchmark.

Retention argument: a client with ~1M MAU and no onboarding paywall finally added one and saw both more revenue *and* better retention — Steve's framing is that "people who pay pay attention".[^4]

When a new app gets ~5 downloads a day and nobody buys, Steve tells clients not to remove the onboarding paywall or make everything free: at that volume it is a download problem. Only with 50–100 downloads/day and still no buyers is something wrong with the offer.[^5]

## Disagreements / caveats
- The 60–80% figure is Steve's rule of thumb, not a published benchmark; the day-zero claim comes from RevenueCat's report.
- Freemium apps that refuse aggressive paywalls can still use onboarding placement with a soft paywall plus a [[reverse-trial-freemium-conversion]].

## See also
- [[hard-vs-soft-paywalls]] — whether users may close it
- [[three-screen-pre-paywall-sequence]] — what to show right before it
- [[people/steve-p-young]]

[^1]: yt:vZXn_BSi5AE @ 01:00 — Steve P. Young
[^2]: yt:bg0_DavI-DE @ 00:52 — Steve P. Young
[^3]: yt:2soA7LyyQ64 @ 01:06 — Steve P. Young
[^4]: yt:bg0_DavI-DE @ 07:09 — Steve P. Young
[^5]: yt:SHctL0V73BE @ 14:24 — Steve P. Young