Playbooks
Show users a personal plan, then ask them to pay
A playbook for phone apps: ask new users a few questions when they first open the app, show them a plan built just for them, then put a paywall (a screen that asks them to pay before they can go on) right after it, with a featured yearly plan and a free trial.
The hard part: designing onboarding questions and a plan that feel truly personal, then getting enough people to download the app in the first place.
Who pays
Users pay a subscription to unlock the plan they were just shown, usually a yearly plan that starts with a free trial. The posters point to apps using this pattern, including a sleep app at $80K MRR and Nomadtable at $100K MRR. One maker reports every one of 24 current trials is on the yearly plan, and another poster says Splitwise roughly doubled its monthly revenue after changing its paywall. These figures are the posters' own claims.
How to build it
Ask a few key questions
Add a short series of onboarding screens that ask about the user's goal, current habits, and main problem. Keep the design clean and calm.
Build their personal plan
Use the answers to show a step-by-step plan for that user, such as a routine to fix their sleep. Claude can help write the plan rules or generate the text, and Supabase can store each user's answers.
Put the paywall right after
Show the paywall as soon as the plan appears, with no free way past it. Tools like RevenueCat or Superwall handle in-app subscriptions on iPhone and Android.
Feature the yearly plan
Highlight a yearly plan with a free trial as the main option, and show the monthly plan as the smaller choice.
Test paywall versions
Try different paywall layouts with RevenueCat or Superwall experiments and keep the version that turns more trials into paid users.
Bring in downloads with slideshows
Post short TikTok slideshows about the problem your app solves to bring new people into the onboarding.
Sources on X
- cesaralvarezll · Aug 11, 2026
cesaralvarezll says a sleep app is making $80K MRR with surprisingly few downloads, crediting its onboarding: a mascot with smooth animations, calming sounds, collecting key user information, and building a detailed plan to fix the user's sleep routine, followed by a hard paywall. The revenue figure is reported by the poster, not verified.
- cesaralvarezll · Apr 15, 2026
The poster describes how Nomadtable, a bootstrapped app they call a $100K MRR app, onboards users: clean design, collecting key user data early, building the profile step by step, and asking for a review midway through onboarding.
- _ferxe · Sep 19, 2026
_ferxe reports 24 trials on their app, every one on the annual plan, with 9 already converted, $265 mrr, $66 real revenue, and 783 people through the door off one TikTok slideshow. These are the poster's own figures, and they credit hard paywalls.
- zzwitz · Jun 10, 2026
zzwitz says Splitwise roughly doubled MRR on fewer downloads, from ~$200k to ~$400k, after a paywall redesign. The old paywall had 8 feature bullets, a free trial announcement, and 2 red price buttons ($29.99/yr OR $2.99/mo).
Ideas are curated from public posts and untested by us. Read the full note.