Over 85–95% of users don’t opt in the first time they see your paywall. It’s huge but it’s normal.

The average trial opt in across all products is 3.8% according to RevenueCat. For me, that feels low. A great trial start rate is 10%, a fantastic rate would be 15%. Depending on the quality of your traffic.

Of the people who do start a trial ~94% will opt-in on day 1. Then a further ~5% in the next 6 days. The remaining ~1% will come in in weeks 2 and 3.

Spread of how long it takes users to opt into free trials for B2C subscription apps.

So time is ticking: your users need to opt into a trial to try your full product offering ASAP. If you don’t — they are likely to churn.

In my experience retention of freemium users can be as low as half of that of premium users. Lower retention and engagement metrics generally precede churn — the less people are using the product the more likely they are to quit.

Correlation or causation? ?

Whilst you can test all you want on your onboarding and paywall (and you should), it’s impossible to get everyone to start a trial in their first session.

There’s a range of reasons why some people won’t hit that ‘start trial’ button the first time they see the paywall, including:

• They need more time to think it through before making a decision
• They’re worried about forgetting and the subscription rolling over
• They feel like they have too many subscriptions already, and want to try the freemium version first
• They may have made another purchase on that day and feel uncharacteristically price-sensitive
• You may have caught someone just before payday, making them hesitant to buy

A lot of these reasons may change in a few days time. That’s where push notifications are crucial to secure the incremental 5–6% trials…

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