---
title: Discount offer right after a trial starts (trial-to-discount)
slug: trial-to-discount-offer
summary: Flow shows a "free gift" 30%-off paid plan immediately after a user starts a free trial; worth testing when trial-to-paid is below the 30–40% norm — decide with simple math.
domain: mobile-apps
tags: [monetization, discount, free-trial, subscription-groups]
related: [paid-intro-offers, pay-what-you-want-discount-slider, subscription-conversion-benchmarks, web2app-upsells-and-downsells]
sources: [yt:2soA7LyyQ64, yt:FWF_AbsR0qc]
updated: 2026-10-23
---

# Trial-to-discount offer

## TL;DR
- Pattern from Flow (women's health): user starts the free trial → "Free gift just for you" → claim 30% off (≈$39.99/yr vs ~$60–80).
- Apple moves the user from the trial to the discounted plan automatically if both are in the **same subscription group**.
- No hard data — Steve flags it as interesting, untested.
- Do the math: if trial-to-paid is below 30–40% and ≥10% would take the discounted plan, you may come out ahead.

## Details
Steve walked through Flow's very long onboarding (longer onboardings work in health & fitness). Its first paywall sent "Start 14-day trial" to a web checkout, which Steve has seen convert worse than Apple's native sheet; after dismissing it the app continued with a chat-style onboarding (which founders say beats swipe-continue flows) and a second paywall with the native Apple prompt.[^1][^2][^3]

After the trial started: "Congratulations… Free gift just for you — claim 30%" for $39.99.[^4] Because the offer is in the same subscription group, Apple handles the crossgrade.[^4]

**When to use:** apps with low trial-to-paid. Industry average trial-to-paid is ~30–40%; if yours is lower and you believe enough triallists would commit now at a discount, model it out.[^5]

## Disagreements / caveats
- Pure anecdote; risk of cannibalising full-price trial conversions among users who would have paid anyway.

## See also
- [[paid-intro-offers]] — the other way to capture committed users early

[^1]: yt:2soA7LyyQ64 @ 09:13 — Steve P. Young
[^2]: yt:FWF_AbsR0qc @ 01:57 — Steve P. Young
[^3]: yt:FWF_AbsR0qc @ 02:48 — Steve P. Young
[^4]: yt:2soA7LyyQ64 @ 10:04 — Steve P. Young
[^5]: yt:FWF_AbsR0qc @ 03:41 — Steve P. Young