Consumer entertainment subscription app

Nearly Tripling Paid LTV:CAC in Four Months

Moved the paywall, restructured the Meta account, and took paid LTV:CAC from 0.15 to 0.42 by doubling how many installs reach a trial at 30% lower cost per trial.

Product: Consumer entertainment subscription app
Model: Consumer subscription, monthly and annual
Timeframe: 4 months

Results

2.7x

Paid LTV:CAC, 0.15 to 0.42

Install to trial start, 10% to a 20% peak

-30%

Cost per trial

The situation

Paid acquisition was running at roughly a sixth of breakeven, with a paywall that asked for money before the product had shown what it did.

What we did

- Moved the paywall behind the product's value moment instead of ahead of it
- Restructured the paid account and reallocated on evidence
  - Social proof and personalization copy ran 19% better on cost per result and 27% cheaper on CPM than product-description copy
  - Reactivated the top performer at $2.90 cost per result against a $4.46 blended average
- Rebuilt the paywall offering after finding the previous change had roughly halved trial conversion on the same SKU
- Redefined activation as a two-beat event and instrumented it, so the first session had a target instead of a tour

Paid LTV:CAC nearly tripled, and it is worth being precise about where that came from. Not from converting trials better, which got worse over the same window, and not from cheaper installs, which got more expensive. It came from getting twice as many installs into a trial at 30% less cost per trial, which is what moving the paywall past the value moment does. That is also the honest limit of the result: at 0.42 the account is not yet at breakeven, and the next gain has to come from the trial-to-paid side rather than the top of the funnel.

Want results like this?

We help consumer apps and products reach their next phase of growth.

Get in touch More case studies