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Mobile apps›Monetization

Why the paywall belongs in onboarding

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.

Updated 2026-10-23·4 sources·monetizationpaywallonboardingconversion

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 sign-up (account creation after purchase) and Better Sleep onboarding and paywall teardown). More paywall views compound: see Showing two paywalls in onboarding (and the 8-paywall-views rule) 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 trials — converting users who closed the paywall.

See also

Footnotes

  1. We’ve Tested 100s of Paywalls. Here’s What Actually Converts. @ 01:00 — Steve P. Young ↩

  2. 56% More Trials With This One Change @ 00:52 — Steve P. Young ↩

  3. The Paywall Strategy That Increased Conversions by 56% @ 01:06 — Steve P. Young ↩

  4. 56% More Trials With This One Change @ 07:09 — Steve P. Young ↩

  5. Why Most Apps Are Failing in 2026: 7 Mistakes Killing Your App Success @ 14:24 — Steve P. Young ↩