Your Monetization Scorecard
4 minYou now have the full formula. Use this page to score your app and decide what to fix first.
The twelve rules
- Win Day 0: about half of conversions, most trial starts, and most cancellations happen on the install day.
- Hard paywall over freemium for conversion: 5x on D35, but identical one-year retention.
- Price for value, then localize: higher prices convert about 2x better and earn 3.3x the LTV.
- Match your plan mix: default to two plans, feature annual, fit category and geography.
- Design a paywall that converts: use the proven elements, skip the gimmicks.
- Make the trial longer: 17 to 32 days converts about 1.7x better than 4 days or less.
- Use offers strategically: an underused lever; anchor near 50 percent off; wean off as you scale.
- Experiment relentlessly: weekly, per market, verified downstream.
- Win the first renewal: the cliff where most subscribers are lost.
- Recover involuntary churn: a third of Google Play churn is a billing failure.
- Win them back: monthly churners reactivate 4x more than annual.
- Use this scorecard to find your weakest stage and fix it first.
Score your app
Fill in your own number for each metric and find which column you land in. Below median means there is a clear rule above to act on.
| Metric | Bottom quartile | Median | Top quartile |
|---|---|---|---|
| D35 download-to-paid (all geos) | under 0.7% | 2.0% | over 4.6% |
| D35 download-to-paid (hard paywall) | under 4.2% | 10.7% | over 20.0% |
| Trial-to-paid (North America) | under 15.6% | 34.2% | over 47.9% |
| Annual year-1 retention | under 20% | about 28% | up to 59% |
| 1st annual renewal | under 23% | 25.2% | over 40% |
| Refund rate | over 5% | 3% to 4% | under 2.5% |
| Google Play involuntary churn | about 32% | lower is better | near App Store 15% |
| Monthly reactivation | under 9% | 20.1% | over 25% |
Recommended implementation order
Work from quick configuration wins toward long-term habits:
- This week (configuration): enable billing grace periods and retry (Rule 10), highlight the annual plan (Rule 4), and add cancel-anytime plus a trial line to your paywall (Rule 5).
- This month (experiments): test a hard paywall or earlier paywall placement (Rules 1, 2), test a longer trial (Rule 6), and test a higher price (Rule 3).
- Ongoing (habits): a standing weekly experiment cadence (Rule 8), Customer Center retention and pause flows (Rules 9, 11), and lifecycle offers (Rule 7).
Next steps
Turn the rules into shipped features with the dedicated build codelabs:
- Build a High-Converting Paywall with Paywalls V2 (Rules 4, 5).
- Implement Free Trial on iOS (Rule 6).
- Boost Your App Revenue with RevenueCat (Rules 7, 8, 9).
- Recover Involuntary Churn from Failed Payments (Rule 10).
The takeaway. None of these levers requires a better idea than the one you already have. They require execution on conversion, pricing, paywalls, trials, and retention. That is what separates the top quartile from the rest. Now go pull the levers.