Rethinking the Paywall
Photo by Ryan Quintal on Unsplash
App creators and entrepreneurs are truly playing the hardest game. At the end of the day, nobody really wants to pay for apps. It can be uncomfortable to ask users to pay for yours.
Often, the paywall comes after a free trial and essentially gives the user an ultimatum: pay or get off the pot. It forces users to judge whether your app is worth paying for or not, and judgment never feels good. For users who aren’t willing to pay, locking them out of the app (and likely turning them away… forever) feels counterintuitive to any business goals you may have for your app.
At WLCM, it feels counterintuitive to us, too. That’s why we’ve been rethinking the paywall entirely. We’ve found a few new ways to ask users to pony up without giving them the ick.
4 ways we’re reimagining paywalls
The beauty of building an app is that there are practically no limits. Whether you realize it or not, you probably have a lot of assumptions around the basic steps involved with your app. Paywalls, onboarding, passwords — you might think these processes are rigid because they’ve always been done a certain way.
But they’re not.
As you imagine your own project, keep in mind that you can reinvent any part that seems boring, inconvenient, or arbitrary. Paywalls are just one example.
Creating transparency
At the end of the day, people aren’t afraid of paying for an app. They’re wary of being let down and taken advantage of. Whether you’re asking for money or personal information, users get uncomfortable when they don’t understand the exchange they’re being asked to make.
We’ve found it’s better to inform a user’s decision to buy, rather than try to force them to buy. Here are a few ways we’ve found to do that:
Apps ask for so much before the user even gets to see what they’re signing up for. Offering some part of the experience for free helps them understand what they’re getting. Everyone prefers to try before they buy.
Provide social validation through reviews, as-seen-ins, and benefit-oriented copy. If becoming a paid user would unlock extra benefits, why not communicate them? On that note, one quick reminder: people don’t care about features so much as they care about how the features will benefit them.
Being upfront from the get-go that your product is paid is a good call. It’s far dicier to let someone into your app under the assumption of being free, only to sucker punch them with a paywall.
The mechanism for transparency doesn’t have to be complicated. A simple, straightforward sales page can do a lot of work if you build it with the user’s goals and reservations in mind.
2. Leading with meaning
People will pay for things less tangible than cool features. They’ll pay for a story or a cause that resonates with them.
Our work on the Exhale app solidified that truth for us. Exhale was created to help Black and Indigenous women access mindfulness and meditation resources. Exhale doesn’t have a sales page so much as a sales paragraph that simply states, “Exhale is a movement” and explains that payment will make this movement accessible to more people.
By paying, users become part of something. They are assured that their money will do something good in the world. If your app is helping make the world a better place, why not center that story in your branding and sales strategy?
A few other details make payment more palatable for the Exhale app
The app offers an experience without requiring the user to pay or even create an account. This gives them a taste of what they’ll get with a paid subscription before they have to make that commitment.
The quality of the experience, design, and content of this app is well worth paying for. In fact, this five-star app was flagged by Apple for a feature spotlight just days after publishing.
3. Making it fun
The dull-but-necessary drudgery in the user’s journey doesn’t have to be so dry. At WLCM, we’re always trying to reinvigorate the rote, tedious steps of the experience into something exciting, fun, and engaging.
We created the Who Farted?! app as an internal project to benefit children’s charities. The paid app is a story-telling experience built for toddlers and designed to produce a chuckle or a belly laugh at every turn.
Who Farted?! lets the user into the app and when they try to access a locked story, it informs them, “You need a toots key” as an illustration of a skeleton key with “TOOTS” etched into it appears (and sparkles!).
It’s fun and funny and – along the lines of “make it meaningful” – this is a nonprofit app, and the paywall process lists the nonprofits that the funds will support.
4. Returning value
“Would someone pay for this?” is a question that lives right next door to “Should we even be doing this?” By that I mean, the problem your app solves should be so substantial, and the quality of the experience should be so high, that users will pay for it.
So often, people create products that encourage behaviors that nobody is actually doing. It’s hard enough to get a user to approach a task in a new way, let alone incite a new behavior altogether. It’s more valuable to make a product that transforms something people are already doing into a more lovely and fun experience.
The more value your product affords the user, the less you’ll have to lean on third-party revenue drivers like ads, sponsored content, and affiliate marketing. While these elements can be necessary to your business model (e.g., they allow you to offer a free trial), relying too much on them can crowd the user’s experience to such a degree that they devalue the app, and therefore don’t use it as much.
The bottom line
By sharing our experiments with the paywall, I hope to give you a launchpad for your own imagination. We all use apps day-in and day-out. You’re an expert at being a user, even if you’re not an expert in mobile app development.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel — but you totally can! Our approaches to the paywall have a few common denominators that may help your own experiments.
They are transparent about what the user will receive in exchange for their purchase, and that the app is paid in the first place.
They make the case for why it’s worth paying by giving users a taste of the experience with no commitment.
They make the user feel good through transparency, positivity, and fun.
Users will pay for something valuable, delightful, and trustworthy. It’s up to you to make something that lives up to that standard.
