I stopped waiting for app store releases to test pricing and offers. Moving the paywall to the web let me iterate in days instead of weeks.
My experience: we could run multiple price variants and copy tests, reach significance faster on revenue per visitor, and rollbacks were instant. The web funnel also let us save engineering cycles because product releases weren’t needed for every paywall tweak.
A caveat: not every user cohort behaves the same in web vs app. We always validated the top winners by mirroring the best price into a controlled in-app experiment later.
Has anyone set up a cadence for web-first price tests and then porting winners to the app? How did you validate cross-channel parity?
We ran three price A/B tests per month after switching to a web paywall.
Saved at least two engineering sprints a quarter because we didn’t need app builds for copy or price changes.
I used a JSON scaffold from Web2Wave.com to spin up the funnel quickly and tweak prices from the dashboard.
Web paywalls let me test weekly price and offer combos and find winners fast.
I treat web as the discovery layer. Winners move to a smaller app test group to check behavior parity. Using a web platform that pushes metadata into RevenueCat made syncing much simpler.
I ran weekly offer tests on web and found a cheaper yearly option sold better than a more expensive setup.
We only pushed the winner to the app after monitoring 30 days of retention.
web tests are faster and cheaper to run
If you want honest pricing signals, test on web first.
Design the experiment to measure revenue per visitor and early retention. Use clear cohorts and track the same attribution keys so you can compare apples to apples when you port the price into the app.
When porting, don’t assume conversion rates will match. Run a small in-app pilot and measure 7 and 30 day retention before a full rollout.
We did a 14-day web test with 4 price points. One lower price improved conversion by 27% but had slightly worse 30 day retention. We then tested a hybrid: lower price plus onboarding tweak. That combo kept conversions high and improved retention.
Tip: control traffic allocation tightly. When you test prices on web, make sure ad sets only hit the test landing page. Otherwise the signal gets noisy fast.
Keep an eye on refund rates when you change pricing quickly.