How Pepper achieved a 50% lifetime value increase with a wild card timeline paywall

Pepper is a cooking app designed for home cooks to save, organize, and share recipes. The team needed to find a paywall design that would increase conversion and, consequently, the lifetime value of their users, which had stalled. They tested a "wild card" paywall design using Superwall's platform that changed how the subscription was presented to the user — for the better.

The challenge

Pepper had stalled with their current paywall designs. The team had run into design fatigue: they had tested multiple traditional paywalls, making simple changes to subheader text and highlights, but couldn't seem to budge LTV.

That led to a new hypothesis. They suspected the entire presentation format was off, and wanted to try something different that better explained their value. But testing a new, multi-step "timeline" design was a high-risk change, so they wanted to try it on a small cohort before deploying widely.

The solution

Pepper deployed a two-step paywall flow that gave more clarity into the free trial commitment. The timeline paywall presented the trial commitment as a clear timeline, outlining what happens each day.

To mitigate the risk of a large drop in performance, this "wild card" paywall was initially tested on only 5% of users. Because the new paywall outperformed all other designs, they scaled to over 50% of the user base.

The new design focused on commitment clarity, proving that showing users the entire lifecycle of the trial built trust and led to higher-quality sign-ups.

The results

The "wild card" timeline paywall led to a massive, sustainable increase in performance:

• LTV increased: the timeline paywall boosted LTV by half, showing that initial clarity led to later commitment.

• Higher baseline: the timeline design outperformed every other paywall tested, providing a baseline for new iterations.

• Sustained growth: LTV was sustained after moving the paywall to a larger user base, confirming long-term profitability.

Is your traditional paywall stuck at a performance ceiling? Pepper's results show that the answer isn't always another minor copy tweak — sometimes it's testing a radically new, high-impact design format that delivers a massive LTV increase.