First steps to monetize your app (1/2): Choosing a paywall
This series of article’s goal is to ask and answer the first questions that may arise when you want to monetize your mobile app. It will be a pair of articles, one focused on how to choose a paywall for your app and the second about the design principles to follow when implementing this paywall.
Beyond scrapping the internet for guidance to these topics, I’ll be using the main idea and features of an app developed for child care in the context of the Apple Developer Academy: Baby Steps.
Baby Steps helps caretakers at nursing schools to keep track of a child’s development. In this way, it provides features such as diaries, health information about the child and a chat to be used between caretakers.
Now that the background is set, off with the first article!
How should I evaluate my app’s features in order to choose the best paywall for it?
Before we start answering any questions, the concept of paywall should be clear. A paywall is a barrier an app can impose in order to limit certain features and contents that cannot be used without prior payment. Most paywalls can be categorized into one of the following types:
- Hard paywalls: the entire app cannot be used if it isn’t bought from the start or if the user doesn’t have a subscription. These paywalls are usually linked to an extremely high demand from the user, such as Netflix, Spotify and games from big producers.
- Soft paywalls: in an app with soft paywall, premium features can be used for a limited number of times — or there may be unlimited use of free features, while premium features will be behind a paywall. There are subtypes of soft paywalls known as metered paywalls and freemium: respectively, there is a metrification of how many times a feature can be used before it should be bought, or the app permanently offers free features while offering premium features behind a paywall. There needs to be special attention regarding the essentiality of the features that will be premium in the freemium model: helpful features should be available for free, to conquer users and to keep them loyal, but the most helpful should be premium. These often include customizations of actions: for example, with the free features in a drawing app, you should be able to create any shape you want and resize them, while with the premium features, you can easily color any shape and export them in any chosen quality.
- Free trial paywalls: as the names states, the app offers a trial, so that the user might be able to experience all the features of the app after a limited time. This type of paywall is welcomed in apps with features that might have continuity in the users daily life and also have a high demand — but since it’s not an established brand or product, before proving this demand exists, it first has to conquer the users.
- Ads paywalls: these are paywalls set by selling a part of your app to show advertisements. There are many subtypes and strategies specific to this type of paywall, but some are already established as highly functioning strategies — such as watch-for-reward ads in game apps — , while others, such as simply showing ads, may not prove as effective, since adblocks make it easy for users to avoid those ads and block monetization.
Now, bringing all these information into Baby Step’s context, we can begin by eliminating an ads paywall as an option — since it’s not supposed to have on-demand features or consumable features that can be rewards for watching ads — and also the free trial paywall, since the context in which the app is used — that is, by caretakers in nurseries — takes a whole semester, instead of the usual 14 ou 30 days trials. A hard paywall is also out of the game, since our app is not a well stablished brand nor has high demand content. And that leaves us with a soft paywall.
Specifying how this soft paywall will be implemented into the application is the goal of the next article. Make sure not to miss it!
