Paywall Optimization: Or How to Make $1 Million With 1 day’s Worth of Coding

Background

Chai AI is the leading platform. We currently offer a subscription which allows users to get no ads and unlimited messages. As such, there is a paywall in the app which is shown to users, reminding them to pay. This screen is shown every time a user opens the app or when they run out of messages (currently they get 70 free messages every 3 hours).

When we first implemented a paywall in Chai, we quickly designed our screen in less than a day. Over time, we kept on adding to it. For example we first added a yearly subscription, then free trial, and finally we added a higher tier subscription. As we added more and more the screen became more cluttered and more confusing. It became less and less clear to users what the value of subscribing was.

We eventually decided that a new paywall screen had to be created from the ground up. The main goal was to provide a more clear message about the value of the subscription to our users. Importantly, it also had to emphasize the free trial and made the call to action a lot more prominent. Additionally, due to its frequency of appearance, we wanted the paywall to look more aligned with our brand.

AB Testing

At Chai we’ve built our own A/B testing framework that allows us to test various things in-app from paywall to different ai models. This allows us to quickly deploy something, iterate and make improvements. In this case, we tested the redesigned paywall (on the right) against the old subscription screen (on the left). Our key metric was looking at what percentage of our users made a purchase in order to understand which paywall was better.

Our old paywall Our new and improved paywall

Results

Percent of new users on iOS who purchased a Chai product on or before a specific day

As you can see in, after two weeks, there was a 20%+ uplift in the number of users who made a purchase. As our annual revenue is over $10 million, the new paywall directly lead to over $1 million of new revenue.

To us, this was a powerful lesson on the value of design and clarity. Just by redesigning one screen, we were able to convince a large portion of our customers of the value of our paid subscription.

Want to do stuff like this full time? Have suggestions on how we could improve our monetization? We’re hiring for various roles, check them out here https://chai-research.com/jobs!