From Free to Paid: Monetizing a Non-Advertising-Based App

For your marketing

Possible founder application

Use this study as a bounded example of from free to paid: monetizing a non-advertising-based app; assess whether its population, intervention and outcome match your own decision.

Reported result

What the study found

Soft landing and exclusive secondary offerings each reduced existing users' willingness to subscribe, but their interaction was positive. A second field experiment produced consistent results, and the paper reports the firm's implementation of the best-performing strategy.

Research question

What the authors investigated

What does from free to paid: monetizing a non-advertising-based app show about customer decisions or business outcomes?

Design

Large-scale randomized field experiment with an app firm comparing hard versus soft landing paywalls and exclusive secondary offerings; supplemented by a firm customer survey, a Prolific experiment, a second field experiment, robustness checks, and implementation of the best-performing strategy.

Sample and setting

Existing users of the app firm in the randomized field experiments; the accessible publisher abstract does not report the experiment sample sizes.

Scope and transfer

Limitations to keep in view

The accessible publisher page did not provide a detailed author-stated limitations section; avoid generalizing beyond the reported study context. Full article methods and correction history were not independently reviewed.

Research sources

Publisher page directly retrieved; candidate metadata and reported result checked against that page. Full methods were not independently reviewed.