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.²³
• Result: 75–80% choose annual at $189/year — no price or positioning change, “simply a UI shift”.⁴⁵
• 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”.⁷⁸

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 Partner ("gym buddy") and family/bundle plans in web funnels.¹⁰

Disagreements / caveats

• Contradicts the “no free trial on web” rule in Web paywall and checkout best practices for web2app (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 (Paywall content — sell the outcome and add context (long paywalls)) 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 The three-screen pre-paywall sequence (explain the free trial) (Blinkist) applied to web.

See also

• Web paywall and checkout best practices for web2app
• Weekly vs monthly vs yearly plans — and which plan gets the trial, How long should the free trial be?
• Built With Science — scaling Meta from $0 to ~$100k/month on top of a big YouTube audience
• Ethan Ethier

Footnotes

1. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 54:26 — Ethan Ethier ↩

2. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 53:39 — Ethan Ethier ↩

3. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 54:26 — Ethan Ethier ↩ ↩²

4. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 34:00 — Ethan Ethier ↩

5. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 52:53 — Ethan Ethier ↩

6. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 55:15 — Ethan Ethier ↩

7. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 56:03 — Ethan Ethier ↩

8. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 57:36 — Ethan Ethier ↩

9. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 32:33 — Ethan Ethier ↩

10. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 34:50 — Ethan Ethier ↩