---
title: Web pricing page — show annual first with a trial timeline (60/40 → 75–80% annual)
slug: web-paywall-annual-default-and-trial-framing
summary: Built With Science's biggest 2026 win — a web pricing page showing only the annual plan with a Blinkist-style day 1 / day 7 / day 12-reminder trial timeline moved plan mix from ~60/40 to 75–80% annual with no price change; adding more context hurt; a "pay now, 20% off" no-trial toggle lost until both options were framed positively.
domain: mobile-apps
tags: [web2app, paywall, pricing, free-trial, annual-plan, experiment]
related: [web2app-paywall-best-practices, three-screen-pre-paywall-sequence, weekly-vs-yearly-plans-and-trial-placement, free-trial-length-by-plan, paywall-price-display-and-plan-count, funnel-experiment-process-problem-first, free-trial-toggle-pricing, removing-the-free-trial]
sources: [yt:EyoYQU6JyV8]
updated: 2026-10-24
---

# Web pricing page: annual first, trial timeline

## TL;DR (Ethan Ethier, Built With Science, 2026)
- **Before:** monthly and annual side by side → ~60/40 annual vs monthly.[^1]
- **After:** only the **annual plan** shown up front, with a **trial timeline**: day 1 personalised plan → day 7 plan adapts to you → **day 12 we remind you** before the 14-day trial ends, cancel anytime; monthly behind a "view all plans" link.[^2][^3]
- **Result:** **75–80% choose annual** at $189/year — no price or positioning change, "simply a UI shift".[^4][^5]
- **Adding more context** to a pricing page (to clarify value) *hurt* conversion — motivated buyers got overwhelmed.[^6]
- **No-trial toggle** (pay now, 20% off, 30-day money-back) vs 14-day trial: negative at first; hypothesis was the copy made the trial look like the worse deal. A new arm framing **both options as good** showed "a very strong lift".[^7][^8]

## Details
**Why it worked:** fewer choices and lower perceived risk of starting the trial (explicit reminder, cancel any time), with annual as the obvious default.[^3]

**Trial-to-paid context.** At these prices BwS sees ~35–40% trial-to-paid on warm organic traffic and ~25% on Meta.[^9]

**Gym buddy add-on.** The two-person discount is asked in the *quiz*, and only appears as a small toggle on the pricing page for those who declined — keeping the paywall simple. See [[web-funnel-partner-and-family-plans]].[^10]

## Disagreements / caveats
- Contradicts the "no free trial on web" rule in [[web2app-paywall-best-practices]] (Steve P. Young, Igor Lyubimov): BwS runs a 14-day trial on the web and their no-trial variant initially *lost*. A strong brand and warm audience likely make trials work; test both.
- "More context hurt" contrasts with long-paywall advice ([[long-paywall-sell-the-outcome]]) and Simply's Japan result — what matters is *which* context and *where* the user is in intent.
- The day-by-day timeline is the in-app pattern from [[three-screen-pre-paywall-sequence]] (Blinkist) applied to web.

## See also
- [[web2app-paywall-best-practices]]
- [[weekly-vs-yearly-plans-and-trial-placement]], [[free-trial-length-by-plan]]
- [[built-with-science-meta-scaling-case]]
- [[people/ethan-ethier]]

[^1]: yt:EyoYQU6JyV8 @ 54:26 — Ethan Ethier
[^2]: yt:EyoYQU6JyV8 @ 53:39 — Ethan Ethier
[^3]: yt:EyoYQU6JyV8 @ 54:26 — Ethan Ethier
[^4]: yt:EyoYQU6JyV8 @ 34:00 — Ethan Ethier
[^5]: yt:EyoYQU6JyV8 @ 52:53 — Ethan Ethier
[^6]: yt:EyoYQU6JyV8 @ 55:15 — Ethan Ethier
[^7]: yt:EyoYQU6JyV8 @ 56:03 — Ethan Ethier
[^8]: yt:EyoYQU6JyV8 @ 57:36 — Ethan Ethier
[^9]: yt:EyoYQU6JyV8 @ 32:33 — Ethan Ethier
[^10]: yt:EyoYQU6JyV8 @ 34:50 — Ethan Ethier