A study of paywall and subscription-flow design based on analysis of thousands of paywalls from consumer apps, presented with guest Jonathan Parra (a paywall designer known for work on paywall experiments at scale). Topics covered include: why the paywall itself is not where users decide to pay, treating the paywall as more than a single screen, paywall timing, persuasion techniques, the role of friction, framing value, what not to copy from other apps, App Store compliance considerations, and key conversion metrics for founders to track. Audience comments add perspectives on App Store guideline risks, the importance of pre-paywall value delivery, running paywall A/B tests in live apps, and whether the advice extends beyond mobile apps to websites. # Channel Presentation Observations ## Intended Audience The video clearly addresses **app developers, product designers, and subscription app founders**: - Direct founder address: *"The metrics that I wish more founders really care the most about is retention and LTV."* - Builder-oriented framing: *"If you're building with AI, that's exactly what Mobbin MCP is for... your AI can reference patterns that already exist in the real world."* - Practitioner-level detail on tools like Superwall, RevenueCat, and App Store compliance (*"in early 2026, Apple also started rejecting paywall patterns..."*). ## Claimed Scope of Expertise - **Research-based authority**: *"After studying nearly 3,000 paywalls, hundreds of subscription flows on Moby, and talking to someone who's designed over 4,700 paywalls."* - Access to named real-world case studies: **Opal, Blinkist, Slopes, Headspace, Moonly, Tide, Tipstop, ClassPass** — presented with specific conversion outcomes (*"trial sign-ups went up from 7% to 17%," "Direct conversions almost tripled"*, *"increased trial starts by 25%"*). - Expert-collaboration framing via recurring named guest **Jonathan** (*"someone who's designed over 4,700 paywalls"*). ## Self-Description Evidence (Creator Claims) - Positions the channel as **evidence-driven pattern analysis**, not opinion: *"Every paywall today kind of looks the same. So, I wanted to know what separates a high-performing paywall from an average one."* - Claims an ecosystem-aware, long-term perspective: *"this is a long-term game"*; *"now that anyone can ship an app, the ones that really put in the time to polish it... are going to be the most successful moving forward."* - Ties its identity to the **Mobbin product ecosystem** (Mobbin library, Mobbin MCP), grounding its authority in that library. ## Observable Presentation Patterns (Demonstrated, Not Claimed) - **Multi-speaker documentary format**: narrator voice plus quoted expert commentary (">>" markers) with music cues — a produced, editorial style. - **Series-style presentation**: ends with an explicit series roadmap — *"Next, watch our breakdown on onboarding flows, dashboard designs, and the psychology behind streaks"* — indicating a recurring UI/UX pattern-analysis format. - **Community engagement hooks**: *"Let us know if you'd like us to dive into cancellation flows or anything else in the comments below."* - Consistent **thesis-driven storytelling**: counterintuitive hooks (*"Sometimes, an ugly paywall could outperform a beautiful one"*, *"More friction could increase conversions"*) backed by data points. - Closing **values positioning**: *"maybe the question isn't how do I get people to pay? It's more of how could I create something worth paying for?"* — signaling a trust/ethics-oriented editorial stance. ## Self-Check All observations cite quoted or precisely described transcript passages; no private motives inferred and no channel-wide conclusions drawn beyond this single video's evidence. # Delivery Observation: "We Studied 2,995 Paywalls. Here's What Actually Converts." ## Format & Structure ### Research-report framing The video opens by establishing a quantitative evidence base before delivering findings: > "After studying nearly 3,000 paywalls, hundreds of subscription flows on Moby, and talking to someone who's designed over 4,700 paywalls, we found this." ### Counterintuitive hook pattern The narrator repeatedly leads with claims that contradict intuition, then supports them with case data: > "Sometimes, an ugly paywall could outperform a beautiful one." > "More friction could increase conversions." ### Case-study scaffolding Findings are consistently anchored to named apps with a *problem → change → result* structure. Recurring result statements include: > "trial sign-ups went up from 7% to 17%" > "Direct conversions almost tripled." > "increased trial starts by 25%" Named case studies: Opal, Blinkist, Tipstop, Slopes, Outsider, Moonly, Tide, Ahead, Headspace, ClassPass. --- ## Voice & Narration Patterns ### Narrator vs. expert alternation The delivery cuts between an omniscient narrator voice and quoted segments from "Jonathan" (the paywall designer). The narrator synthesizes; Jonathan gives practitioner detail. Jonathan's segments are marked by first-person, conversational speech: > "I am a huge fan of tables." > "I can't make a judgement yet as to whether like this in itself does the best because I have not done a test yet..." ### Rhetorical question as pivot The narrator uses questions to transition into new sections: > "What if we got rid of the paywall altogether?" > "If you're wondering what the best pricing structure is, it depends on what you're optimizing for." ### Aphoristic summary lines Sections close with condensed, quotable principles: > "A paywall isn't just a screen. It's a flow." > "The offer didn't change. The way it was presented did." > "there is literally no universal best paywall, only better experiments" --- ## Vocabulary & Recurring Phrases - **"Paywall"** dominates throughout; extended compounds appear: *"multi-page paywalls," "long-form paywall," "spin the wheel paywall," "pay ramp."* - **Conversion/testing lexicon:** "conversions," "trial sign-ups," "optimize," "variant," "test," "LTV," "retention." - **Risk-reduction framing** recurs as a theme: "reducing risk," "less risky," "no commitment cancel anytime," "preserving trust." - **"Moving forward"** appears twice in Jonathan's polish discussion — possible verbal tic, though two instances is thin evidence. - Hedged qualifiers are common, especially in Jonathan's speech: "almost always," "hit or miss," "maybe," "I think." --- ## Teaching Habits ### Honest uncertainty disclosure Jonathan explicitly flags what he has *not* tested, a notable credibility habit: > "I can't make a judgement yet as to whether like this in itself does the best because I have not done a test yet where everything is the same except for this right chevron" ### Correlation vs. causation awareness He distinguishes observed patterns from proven mechanisms: > "in most of the paywalls that end up winning, they have this right chevron." ### Tactical ethics commentary He evaluates tactics against long-term business health, not just short-term conversion: > "If you're optimizing for a longer-term business, that may not be a good paywall for you. But, if you're optimizing for a weekly price and you want to maximize revenue, unfortunately, it works." ### Context-dependent prescriptions Rather than absolute rules, advice is conditioned on goals: > "Ideally, you want to default to a yearly product... but a yearly product may not be the best for your business." --- ## Communication Patterns ### Specificity as persuasion Numbers and product names appear constantly (3,000 paywalls, 4,700 paywalls, 7%/17%, 25%, "17 screens to cancel"), including a closing trivia hook: > "it takes less than five screens to subscribe to ClassPass, but 17 screens to cancel." ### Contrastive pairs Claims frequently come in opposites: single-page vs. multi-page, friction up vs. friction down, ugly vs. beautiful, getting subscribers vs. keeping them: > "Getting people to subscribe is one thing. Building something that people continues to pay for is much harder." ### Audience hand-off The video closes with a direct call for engagement and a next-watch list: > "Let us know if you'd like us to dive into cancellation flows or anything else in the comments below." --- ## Uncertainty Notes - The transcript interleaves narrator and Jonathan segments without speaker labels; attribution above is inferred from content and the ">>" quote markers, so some line attributions may be off. - "Moving forward" as a habitual filler rests on only two instances — insufficient repetition to call it a stable verbal tic. - [music] markers suggest significant reliance on visual demonstration; the verbal delivery alone may not capture the full teaching method (e.g., screen walkthroughs). # Observation Record: "We Studied 2,995 Paywalls. Here's What Actually Converts." ## Source Basis - **Basis:** Video transcript only. No curated speaker metadata was supplied. - **Speaker identification:** The transcript distinguishes two voices via `>>` markers — a **primary narrator/host** (who presents the study, app examples, and Mobbin MCP promotion) and an unnamed quoted expert referred to in the narration as **"Jonathan"** (described in-transcript as someone who "designed over 4,700 paywalls"). Attribution below follows these transcript cues; Jonathan's exact role or affiliation beyond what is stated is not asserted. --- ## Core Thesis - **Narrator:** After studying ~3,000 paywalls, hundreds of subscription flows on Mobbin, and consulting Jonathan (4,700+ paywalls designed), the central claim: *"A paywall isn't just a screen. It's a flow."* - **Narrator (revised view):** "I used to think the decision happens on a paywall, but actually, users sometimes decide to pay before they even see the paywall." - **Jonathan:** "All the different touchpoints are extremely important." --- ## Counterintuitive Findings ### Ugliness can win - **Narrator (opening):** "Sometimes, an ugly paywall could outperform a beautiful one." - **Jonathan:** "No matter what I did, the ugly paywall with a ton of text completely over performed anything that I would do." - **Jonathan (AI girlfriend app example):** "They had probably the ugliest paywall I've ever seen... very aggressive squeeze page kind of paywall... that ended up over-performing pretty much any paywall that I tried to do." ### Friction can increase conversions - **Jonathan:** "Multi-page paywalls almost always do better than single-page paywalls." - **Narrator (Outsider example):** Requiring credit card details caused sign-ups to drop by more than half, but conversion rates increased 5x — "more than double the paying customers." Stated interpretation: "The extra friction filtered out people who were never serious." --- ## Timing & Lifecycle Reasoning - **Narrator:** Paywalls can appear after onboarding, on feature unlock, in settings, or as win-back offers; contextual placement makes them "more personalized." - **Jonathan:** Monetization requires thinking "about the entire life cycle of the customer"; paywalls are "the only part of the app that makes money" (in his framing, despite product's importance). - **Opal example (narrator):** Selling the outcome ("getting 8 years of your life back") before the paywall; trial sign-ups rose from 7% to 17%. - **Narrator:** "Even if you have a well-designed paywall, if it appears at the wrong moment, it's still a bad paywall." ## Risk Reduction - **Narrator:** Best paywalls address hesitation ("Will I forget to cancel?") by reducing risk. - **Blinkist:** Users felt tricked by free trials; a step-by-step timeline redesign increased trial sign-ups, reduced complaints, and lifted push-notification opt-ins. - **Tipstop:** Same offer, better presentation (free trial emphasis, discount badge) — "Direct conversions almost tripled." - **Slopes:** Removed the paywall entirely ("pay ramp," inspired by Apple's redeem flow); trial starts +25%. ## Specific Tactical Claims (Jonathan) - **"No commitment, cancel anytime" subtitle** "always seems to do well" — "will bump things up incrementally." - **Custom CTA text vs. "Continue":** "hit or miss, but I do like to experiment." - **Right chevron on button:** *Qualified claim* — "I can't make a judgement yet... I have not done a test yet where everything is the same except for this right chevron, but in most of the paywalls that end up winning, they have this right chevron." - **Exit intent sheet:** When users attempt to cancel, offer a monthly plan. - **Aggressive last-minute discounts:** "I wouldn't really do this unless it's maybe Cyber Monday Black Friday"; recommends larger trials instead for compliance and trust. - **Social proof:** "These social accolades are really nice to kind of show credibility and authority." ## Pricing & Packaging - **Headspace test (narrator):** 7/14/30-day trials tested; winning variant was a 14-day trial on the annual plan — longer trial made the decision "feel less risky." - **Jonathan on structure:** Default to yearly (highest LTV), but it "may not be the best for your business"; show only **two** options to reduce cognitive load; hide others behind "View all plans." - **Jonathan:** "Huge fan of tables" (feature-comparison paywalls) — notes tables are hard to build in Superwall, which may explain their scarcity in RevenueCat/Superwall. - **Narrator:** Video paywalls "could communicate value faster than static screenshots or bullet points." ## Polish - **Jonathan:** Cites Focus Town (Animal Crossing-esque branding) as the bar: since "anyone can ship an app," polish via animation, character design, and world-building will determine the most successful apps. - **Narrator:** Polish "could be the reason why someone chooses your product" in direct competition. ## Skepticism & Ethical Qualifications (Jonathan) - **Spin-the-wheel paywalls:** "Works extremely well" but "I really have a hard time accepting" it; may suit weekly-price revenue maximization, but not "a longer-term business." Notes: "everyone is also starting to use it." - **User adaptation:** "More and more users are getting comfortable closing paywalls because they know they're going to get some kind of offer afterwards." - **Apple policy (narrator):** In early 2026, Apple began rejecting paywall patterns relying on free-trial toggles as confusing/misleading. - **Jonathan:** "Just remember that this is a long-term game." ## Testing Philosophy - **Narrator:** "There is literally no universal best paywall, only better experiments." - **Jonathan (crediting "Jake and Nick at Superwall"):** "Design tests move the needle the most" — run radically different designs (video, bullet list, trial timeline, long-form) until one clearly wins; then test copy, pricing, and flow. - **Jonathan:** Keep the base paywall simple first; gather baseline stats before optimizing placements. ## Retention Framing - **Jonathan:** "The metrics that I wish more founders really care the most about is retention and LTV." - **Narrator (closing):** "Maybe the question isn't how do I get people to pay? It's more of how could I create something worth paying for?" - **Fun fact (narrator):** ClassPass takes fewer than 5 screens to subscribe but 17 to cancel. ## Promotion - **Narrator:** Promotes **Mobbin MCP** — gives AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) access to Mobbin's library to "ground" AI output in real shipped designs. --- ## Contradictions & Qualifications Preserved - **Design vs. conversion tension:** Beautiful, polished paywalls are praised (Focus Town, Opal) while ugly, text-heavy, aggressive paywalls are repeatedly cited as outperforming — the video holds both without resolving them. - **Friction:** Framed as both harmful ("reducing risk") and beneficial (Outsider's credit-card filter) depending on context. - **Jonathan's hedge:** The right-chevron benefit is explicitly untested in isolation — recorded as tentative, not settled. - **Spin-the-wheel:** Explicit tension between what converts and what Jonathan endorses. ## Unverified / Not Independently Corroborated All conversion statistics (7%→17%, 5x, 25%, "almost tripled") are as stated in the transcript; no underlying data, methodology, or sample details were provided in the source. # Video Attribution & Provenance Record ## Speaker Identification ### Narrator / Host (unnamed) - The primary off-screen narrator provides framing, case study walkthroughs, and transitions throughout the transcript. No name is supplied in the source material. ### Guest Expert (unnamed in metadata) - Identified only as **Jonathan** in the transcript. Role: paywall/subscription monetization practitioner. - Credentialed via a claim made in the video's framing: he is "someone who's designed over 4,700 paywalls." - Jonathan is quoted extensively and attributed by name for all of his segments (multi-page paywalls, exit intent sheets, table-based paywalls, spin-the-wheel paywalls, AI girlfriend app example, retention/LTV advice). - **Limitation:** Jonathan's full name, company affiliation, and exact title are not provided in the source. > Attribution uncertainty: multiple speakers are marked only with `\>\>` markers; the narrator and Jonathan are distinguishable by content and by direct mentions of "Jonathan," but not every segment can be mapped to a named speaker with certainty. ## Referenced Sources & Third-Party Claims ### Research claimed in-video - Study of **nearly 3,000 paywalls** and **hundreds of subscription flows on Mobbin** (stated as the basis of the video). Methodology details not supplied. ### Case studies / apps cited (claims presented without external verification) - **Opal** — outcome-selling flow; trial sign-ups reportedly rose from 7% to 17%. - **Ahead** — gradual information reveal; price anchoring vs. coffee/therapy. - **Blinkist** — trial timeline redesign; more trial sign-ups, fewer complaints, higher push opt-ins. - **Tipstop** — trial emphasis and discount badge; direct conversions "almost tripled." - **Slopes** — "pay ramp" inspired by Apple's redeem flow; trial starts up 25%. - **Outsider** — credit card required upfront; sign-ups halved, conversion up 5x. - **Moonly** — free trial on annual plan only. - **Headspace** — tested 7/14/30-day trials; 14-day annual won. - **Tide** — weekly price breakdown. - **Focus Town** — cited by Jonathan as polish/branding example. - **ClassPass** — "less than five screens to subscribe... 17 screens to cancel." - Unnamed **AI girlfriend app** — "ugliest paywall" that over-performed. ### Third-party people & tools referenced - **Jake and Nick at Superwall** — advice that design tests move the needle most. - **Apple** — statements on paywall compliance and early-2026 rejections of free-trial-toggle patterns. - **Superwall and RevenueCat** — paywall A/B testing tools; Jonathan notes tables are hard to build in Superwall. ## Promotional Segments - **Mobbin MCP promotion** (explicit): the narrator promotes Mobbin MCP — a tool giving AI assistants (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) access to Mobbin's library. This is a promotional segment for the creator's own product and should be flagged as such. - **Mobbin platform promotion** (implicit): the video's research premise centers on Mobbin's library; closing screens direct viewers to more Mobbin breakdowns (onboarding, dashboards, streak psychology). ## Comment Availability - The narrator explicitly invites viewer comments: *"Let us know if you'd like us to dive into cancellation flows or anything else in the comments below."* This indicates a comment section is available/enabled. ## Provenance Limitations - No links, documents, or datasets provided to verify the 2,995-paywall study or any conversion figures. - No named host; speaker attribution between narrator and guest relies on transcript context and name mentions only. - No external citations or third-party reports are provided in the transcript itself. After studying nearly 3,000 paywalls, hundreds of subscription flows on Moby, and talking to someone who's designed over 4,700 paywalls, we found this. \>\> \[music\] \>\> Sometimes, an ugly paywall could outperform a beautiful one. \>\> No matter what I did, the ugly paywall with a ton of text completely over performed anything that I would do. \>\> More friction could increase conversions. \>\> Multi-page paywalls almost always do better than single-page paywalls. \>\> Every paywall today kind of looks the same. So, I wanted to know what separates a high-performing paywall from an average one. I used to think the decision happens on a paywall, but actually, users sometimes decide to pay before they even see the paywall. \>\> All the different touchpoints are extremely important. \>\> The paywall can appear after onboarding, when you unlock a premium feature, inside settings, \[music\] or even as a win-back offer before you leave. \>\> Those paywalls speak more to the user because they're more personalized. You're constantly trying to get the user to either pay or stay as a subscribing member, and so you have to think about the entire life cycle of the customer. And yes, product is important for being able to solve a problem, but life cycle monetization and the paywalls, that's the only part of the app that makes money. \>\> A paywall isn't just a screen. It's a flow. Before asking for money, Opal spends time selling the outcome, getting 8 years of your life back. By the time you reach the paywall, it doesn't feel like \[music\] an interruption. By showing users how many years of their life they could save, trial sign-ups went up from 7% to 17%. Jonathan prefers multi-page paywalls. \>\> Multi-page paywalls almost always do better than single-page paywalls. And so, in this paywall, you're at the end of the customer journey and onboarding, and you've just showed the customer that hey, your plan is ready. This is what you can expect. You're speaking to them from an emotional perspective. You're telling them they're going to start feeling like themselves in 4 weeks or you're going to tell them something that is in line with their actual ideal outcome. Does the paywall already feel part of the experience? Like if it's an onboarding, is it a natural segue to kind of finish the onboarding? \>\> A Head takes a similar approach. Information unfolds gradually. It gives users time to process the decision instead of forcing them to absorb everything at once. I think when a paywall works, it doesn't feel like you've hit a wall. It feels like the product is asking you to take the natural next step. Even if you have a well-designed paywall, \[music\] if it appears at the wrong moment, it's still a bad paywall. One example is the one-time offer. If you close it, it's gone. Paired with animation and haptic feedback, this helps to pull the attention of the user the moment that you're considering an upgrade. Even when the timing is right, people can still hesitate. Will I forget to cancel? Am I making the right decision? And that's why some of the best-performing paywalls focus on reducing risk. Blinkist had a problem. Their users complained about free trials because they felt tricked into being charged. So, they redesigned the paywall screen to show a step-by-step timeline. The result was more trial sign-ups, fewer complaints. Push notification opt-ins also went up, which makes sense because they remind you before your trial ends. \>\> \[music\] \>\> Tipstop emphasized the free trial, added a discount badge, and made the offer easier to understand. The offer didn't change. The way it was presented \[music\] did. Direct conversions almost tripled. And then there's Slopes. Instead of redesigning the paywall, they asked a different question. What if we got rid of the paywall altogether? They took inspiration from Apple's redeem free trial approach and built what they call a pay ramp. Users see a single action, redeem your free week. No traditional paywall standing in the way. This alone increased trial starts by 25%. Which brings us to one of Jonathan's favorite paywall tweaks. \>\> This no commitment cancel anytime subtitle always seems to do well. Adding it to the paywall will bump things up incrementally. And then also having some kind of call to action for what the user is doing instead of just continue is hit or miss, but I do like to experiment with that as well. Another thing too is like having this right chevron here on the button. I can't make a judgement yet as to whether like this in itself does the best because I have not done a test yet where everything is the same except for this right chevron, but in most of the paywalls that end up winning, they have this right chevron. So, I've also started to include it on the button along with this subtitle here. \>\> Jonathan takes this idea one step further. \>\> So, if they try to hit cancel over here, I like to show the users an exit intent sheet. If they're not ready to commit for a year, you can still subscribe to the monthly plan. \>\> And when we talked about aggressive last minute discounts? \>\> I wouldn't really do this unless it's maybe Cyber Monday Black Friday. I'm really curious to see how Apple is going to approach that this year for all these different sales, but to make sure that I'm compliant and safe, I'd recommend instead to have an offer with a larger trial. \>\> Giving users a longer trial could help you achieve the same goal while preserving trust. So, if reducing risk helps with conversions, we would expect that removing friction will do the same. But that's not the case. To start your free trial on Outsider, \>\> \[music\] \>\> you'll need to enter your credit card details. Sign-ups dropped by more than half, but the conversion rates increased by five times, more than double the paying customers. The extra friction filtered out people who were never serious in the first place. Moonly discovered something similar. They introduced a free trial, but only on the annual plan. Sometimes what changes isn't the offer, it's how the offer is framed. One of the most common techniques is social proof with real user reviews and a five-star rating. \>\> These social accolades are really nice to kind of show credibility and authority. \>\> The second common technique is value framing. \>\> \[music\] \>\> You're framing the value in such a way that it matches what the users care about. All these screens are selling different futures. \[music\] And then there's price anchoring. Tide breaks down the price into smaller weekly amounts. Ahead compares its subscription to things people already spend money on, like coffee or therapy. Next up, pricing and packaging. Headspace \[music\] tested 7-day, 14-day, and 30-day free trials. The winning variant was this, 14-day trial for \[music\] the annual plan. Even though the annual plan costs more, the longer trial made the whole decision feel less risky. If you're wondering what the best pricing structure is, \[music\] it depends on what you're optimizing for. \>\> Ideally, you want to default to a yearly product because we see that that has the highest LTV, but a yearly product may not be the best for your business. If you need to, you have that yearly product with \[music\] a weekly or with a monthly product. You only want to show two to decrease cognitive load on the user. So, if you do want to support other pricing options, you always hide it behind a view all plans button that opens up a sheet with all the different pricing. You want to keep the base paywall simple, get a bunch of users in there to see how your base stats perform before you go crazy on optimizing all your different placements. \>\> Jonathan is also a big believer in table-based \[music\] paywalls. \>\> I am a huge fan of tables. They're a little hard to build in Superwall. I think that's maybe why, like in RevenueCat and Superwall, I'm not really seeing a lot of tables. These also do a good job of showcasing what you're missing out on if you don't subscribe. This also works pretty well. A video paywall showing you the app in action and simple bullet list, simple social proof here of people already using your app. \>\> Video could communicate value faster than static screenshots or bullet points. Now, one thing we kept coming back to was polish. \>\> I think animations work really well. There's an app that I really like right now that's going viral. It's called Focus Town, and they've done an amazing job of branding and creating a Animal Crossing-esque experience, and that's the level of polish that we're going to be seeing from the most successful apps moving forward. You know, the bar has just been raised because now that anyone can ship an app, the ones that really put in the time to polish it with animations, with custom character designs, with world building are going to be the most successful moving forward. \>\> When two products are competing for the same user, polish could be the reason why someone chooses your product over the others. \[music\] If you're building with AI, that's exactly what Mobbin MCP is for. It gives tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor access to Mobbin's library. So, instead of making things up, \[music\] your AI can reference patterns that already exist in the real world, compare how apps design their paywalls, and pull examples directly into your workflow. Think of it as grounding your AI's output in what's already been shipped. Not every pattern is worth copying. Some of the highest converting paywalls are the ones Jonathan is the most skeptical of. The same tactics you'll find in drop shipping stores and e-commerce websites. \>\> So, one paywall that works extremely well that I really have a hard time accepting is the spin the wheel paywall. This is a predetermined spin the wheel Lottie file that may land on some kind of discounted percentage. You know, the user gets to claim it and then cuz they've just won something, the idea is that they'll uh be more likely to then subscribe at that price point. If you're optimizing for a longer-term business, that may not be a good paywall for you. But, if you're optimizing for a weekly price and you want to maximize revenue, unfortunately, it works. The issue is that everyone is also starting to use it or I'm seeing it used a lot more. \>\> When every app uses fake urgency tactics, users eventually stop believing it. \>\> I think more and more users are getting comfortable closing paywalls because they know they're going to get some kind of offer afterwards. \>\> And in early 2026, Apple also started rejecting paywall patterns that relied on free trial toggles because some of these were considered confusing or misleading. \>\> Just remember that this is a long-term game. \>\> Jonathan once worked with an AI girlfriend app. \>\> They had probably the ugliest paywall I've ever seen and it was really compact elements, very aggressive squeeze page kind of paywall. So, that ended up over-performing pretty much any paywall that I tried to do. \>\> Which means that there is literally no universal best paywall, only better experiments. \>\> One thing that I learned from Jake and Nick at Superwall was that design tests move the needle the most. We ended up running radically \[music\] different designs until you find something that blows everything out of the water. You could have a video paywall, you could have bullet list paywall, a trial timeline paywall, a long-form \[music\] paywall. \>\> Test every copy, the pricing, the flow until something clearly wins. Getting people to subscribe is one thing. Building something that people continues to pay for \[music\] is much harder. \>\> The metrics that I wish more founders really care the most about is retention and LTV. I think if retention and LTV are good, you're building a good product and you want to build good products so that the ecosystem is flourishing in itself. So, \>\> maybe the question isn't how do I get people to \[music\] pay? It's more of how could I create something worth paying for? Fun fact, \>\> \[music\] \>\> it takes less than five screens to subscribe to ClassPass, but 17 screens to cancel. Let us know if you'd like us to dive into cancellation flows or anything else in the comments below. Next, watch our breakdown on onboarding flows, dashboard designs, and the psychology behind streaks. I'll see you there.