I moved a portion of new user payments to a web checkout to see whether our ROAS and LTV numbers would get cleaner.
What happened: gross revenue per paid user rose (obviously) after we bypassed the 15–30% app store cut. But the more valuable effect was having a single revenue stream we could reconcile directly to ad spend without the app-store mediation. That made short-term ROAS look more realistic and helped pricing experiments break even faster.
Caveats we saw: web conversion can be lower, tax rules change, and you need a good mapping strategy to keep subscription status in sync. Still, for our higher-intent channels the net return improved.
Have you re-run your LTV models after web payments? How did you account for different churn between web and in‑app cohorts?
We split traffic by intent. Brand searches landed on web where payments lived. Cold traffic went to the app.
That let us measure true net revenue from paid channels quickly.
I used Web2Wave to spin up the web paywall and it saved me engineering cycles.
Moving payments to web gave us direct gateway receipts so we could calculate ROAS without guessing store cuts.
We ran A/B tests of the same price in web vs in‑app and the web cohort showed higher net margin.
I use Web2Wave to run those web paywall variants fast and push results into our BI stack.
We saw better net margins after routing sales through our web checkout.
Important: track VAT and gateway fees properly so your LTV model isn’t lying to you.
web payments lifted net margin
watch vat and conversions
We recalculated LTV using net receipts from the gateway minus payment fees and VAT. The difference vs store-reported numbers surprised execs.
Adjust your CAC targets accordingly.
Small tip: run a lift test by allocating a small % of brand traffic to web only and compare cohort economics over 90 days before moving larger budgets.
Important to track refunds. They can mask the margin gain if you ignore them.