Playbook
Price Testing & Optimization for Subscription Apps
Test price points, trials, and intro offers as paywall variants with Superwall, judge them on net revenue, and ship the winner — no app release required.
Turn price into a real experiment — test price points, trials, and intro offers, judge them on net revenue, and ship the winner. Pricing is the highest-leverage lever in a subscription app, and the hardest to test when it is hard-coded into a build. Superwall makes it a dashboard experiment with no app release and no engineering queue.
Why it matters
Most apps pick a price once and never revisit it, leaving revenue on the table. A small change to a price point, trial length, or intro offer can move ARPU and LTV across your entire subscriber base — but only if you can test it safely and read the results clearly.
This is one of the most requested jobs from subscription teams: in Superwall's voice-of-customer research, price testing and optimization showed up as a top-tier demand signal (32% of customer calls). The blocker is almost always the same — pricing changes are high-leverage but painful to test inside the app, because they normally mean a code change and an app release.
Superwall removes that blocker by making pricing a campaign experiment you control from the dashboard.
What you can do with Superwall
Run head-to-head price experiments. Add two or more paywalls to an audience, each pointing at different products or price points, to start an experiment and split traffic between them.
Test offers, trials, and framing. Attach different products to compare annual vs monthly, trial length, free vs paid trials, and intro offer pricing.
Measure true lift with holdouts. Set your presentation percentages to total less than 100% to create a holdout — a control group that sees no paywall — and measure the real revenue impact of a price change.
Target the right users. Filter audiences by geography or other rules for localized pricing, or use Demand Score to target users by their likelihood to convert and match them to the right offer.
Control pricing copy. Use Liquid and dynamic values to format prices — for example, showing an annual plan in monthly terms — without touching app code.
How it works
Add your products. Add your store products (App Store, Google Play, or Stripe) once so they can be used across paywalls. On device, prices are pulled live and localized directly from the store.
Build paywall variants. Use the paywall editor to create variants at different price points or with different offers.
Split traffic. Add the variants to an audience and set presentation percentages. Assignments are sticky, so each user stays in their bucket.
Read the results. The Results tab defaults to Proceeds Per User — the revenue you keep after refunds, store fees, and taxes — so you judge price on net revenue, not top-line sales.
Ship the winner. Set the losing variant to 0% to keep the winner live. Removing a variant does not reset your metrics.
Proof from customers
Price testing and optimization is a top-ranked demand signal in Superwall's customer research, sitting alongside the broader job customers describe most often: test anything, fast, without shipping a build. Teams consistently say pricing is one of the changes that can materially increase revenue — especially when paired with platform, geography, or segment-aware targeting — yet it is the change they are most afraid to make inside a hard-coded app.
Superwall is built to make that change safe and routine.
Use cases
Find your floor and ceiling. Run a higher and lower price point against your current one to find where revenue per user peaks.
Trial and intro-offer tuning. Test trial length, free vs paid trials, and intro pricing to maximize trial-to-paid conversion.
Localized / geo pricing. Use audience rules to test region-appropriate price points and capture more value internationally.
High-intent offers. Use Demand Score to show different pricing or offers to users by conversion likelihood.
Measure the paywall itself. Use a holdout to confirm a price or paywall change actually lifts net revenue versus showing nothing.
Get started
- Read Starting an Experiment to set up your first price test.
- See Adding Products to connect the price points you want to test.
- Get started with Superwall and run your first price experiment at superwall.com.