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.¹²³

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 ($1.99 first month that renews yearly) — the other way to capture committed users early

Footnotes

1. The Paywall Strategy That Increased Conversions by 56% @ 09:13 — Steve P. Young ↩

2. App Monetization Tactics No One Is Talking About @ 01:57 — Steve P. Young ↩

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

4. The Paywall Strategy That Increased Conversions by 56% @ 10:04 — Steve P. Young ↩ ↩²

5. App Monetization Tactics No One Is Talking About @ 03:41 — Steve P. Young ↩