Tiered subscriptions plus consumables

TL;DR

• One tier at one price leaves money on both sides: people who’d pay $10–20 but not $30, and people who’d happily pay $50–60.
• Add 2–3 subscription tiers (more gets too complex), then fill the gaps with microtransactions — closest practical thing to perfect price discrimination.
• Subscriptions give predictable revenue; consumables alone swing month to month with user need.
• At Tinder, free users rarely buy consumables — consumables are most valuable with a subscription (Boosts/Super Likes get you likes; Gold lets you see them).
• Build the top tier from whale behaviour: Gold users spending $100–250/month on consumables led to Platinum (bundled consumables + message-before-match).
• Good consumables scale roughly linearly with value: 10 should be ~10x better than 1.

Details

Ravi Mehta’s demand-curve chart (ex-CPO Tinder): x-axis paying users, y-axis willingness to pay. Tinder Plus (lower price, many payers) → Gold → Platinum (highest price, fewest payers) form a stair-step; consumables sit on top of each tier to fill the area under the curve.¹² Games use the same subscription + purchasable-items model.³

Why keep a subscription at all. It’s a strong “threshold” monetisation point that moves a large set of free users to paid predictably; microtransaction-only revenue rises and falls with users’ monthly need.³⁴

Free users vs consumables. On Tinder very few free users buy microtransactions — there’s a notable gap in the chart right of the cheapest subscription. The products interlock: Super Likes (3x more likely to match⁵) and Boosts get more people to swipe right; Gold shows who did. Without Gold, consumables are worth much less.⁶⁷ The cheapest tier is an on-ramp across the “penny gap”, from which users upgrade to Gold or consumables.⁸

Building the top tier. Platinum started from Gold users spending $100–250/month on consumables. Research showed motivation was utilitarian (more matches), not status signalling — they wanted more than the product could do. Platinum bundles extra Super Likes/Boosts and lets you message before matching, breaking a core “game rule”.⁹¹⁰ Tiers grew organically: launch one, learn what’s valued, add the next level.¹¹

Testing at scale. Tinder reportedly had more App Store SKUs than any other app — test prices like $7.99/$8.99/$9.99 per tier, boost bundles, multiplied by country pricing.⁵

Designing consumables. Ask how value scales with usage and sell more of whatever users do more of when they get value; prices must make sense for the value (a $1-per-scan add-on on a utility scanner “won’t fly”).¹²¹³

Two-tier paywalls in practice. Jonathan Parra (Superwall) sees more social, dating and AI image/video apps with two tiers (Plus/Pro, like ChatGPT) across weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly — painful to manage but growing. To push the higher tier he styles it as premium: in one Hinge-inspired paywall the Pro option switches to a dark, high-contrast design vs a white Plus, and more users chose Pro.¹⁴¹⁵ He’s surprised more consumer apps don’t sell credits on top of a rate-limited subscription the way Claude/ChatGPT Max users top up.¹⁴ He also recommends a friends & family plan (usually annual) as an under-used LTV lever.¹⁶

Other examples. BoldVoice: ~$150/year lead plan, monthly fallback, a $200/year higher tier with AI chat, plus $400–500/hour human coaching.¹⁷ Skylight notes some buyers just “want the best” tier regardless of feature use (David Barnard’s Tinder observation applies).¹⁸

Disagreements / caveats

• Tinder works at huge scale with network effects; small apps may not have the volume to test many tiers or SKUs.
• Ravi suggests 2–3 tiers max; Parra notes managing multi-tier × multi-period pricing gets messy in tooling.

See also

• Setting your first subscription price
• How many plans to show and how to display prices
• Ravi Mehta, Jonathan Parra

Footnotes

1. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 01:47 — David Barnard ↩

2. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 02:49 — David Barnard ↩

3. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 03:35 — Ravi Mehta ↩ ↩²

4. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 05:08 — Ravi Mehta ↩

5. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 18:46 — Ravi Mehta ↩ ↩²

6. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 10:23 — Ravi Mehta ↩

7. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 11:15 — Ravi Mehta ↩

8. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 12:05 — Ravi Mehta ↩

9. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 13:01 — Ravi Mehta ↩

10. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 13:47 — Ravi Mehta ↩

11. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 17:40 — Ravi Mehta ↩

12. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 20:48 — Ravi Mehta ↩

13. How Tinder Captures More Value With Tiered Pricing and Consumables — Ravi Mehta @ 22:06 — David Barnard ↩

14. I made 4,000 app paywalls and learned this @ 42:09 — Jonathan Parra ↩ ↩²

15. I made 4,000 app paywalls and learned this @ 52:04 — Jonathan Parra ↩

16. I made 4,000 app paywalls and learned this @ 49:45 — Jonathan Parra ↩

17. Why BoldVoice charged from day 1 and ignored the Duolingo freemium playbook — Anada Lakra @ 15:26 — Anada Lakra ↩

18. How Skylight Doubled Subscription Prices to $79 – Michael Segal & Mark Ungerer @ 19:49 — David Barnard ↩