I moved our onboarding and paywall to a web funnel to stop losing 15–30% on every subscription. In practice we did save meaningful margin, but it was not purely technical trickery — it required product changes and a few tradeoffs.
What worked:
- web purchases avoided app-store cuts on the initial sale, which improved our net revenue per new subscriber; at scale that compound effect is obvious.
- long-form web paywalls let us build trust (social proof, pricing detail) that the app paywall never handled well.
- faster paywall experiments: we could swap offers without a store release and test creative/pricing rapidly.
What bit us:
- mapping a web purchase to an app identity was fiddly. We solved it with server-side linking to our subscription provider and a short sync flow in the app, but users sometimes hit friction on Android vs iOS links.
- taxes and refunds needed new ops and automation.
I’ll share code snippets and the sync approach if that helps. How have you handled mapping web payments to in‑app entitlements without breaking the user flow?
We moved the paywall to web and the first week felt chaotic.
I used an AI funnel generator then dropped the JSON into our setup. It gave us a working flow we could iterate on.
Key trick was server side linking of purchase id to user id so the app sees entitlement immediately.
Moving checkout to web let us test 5 price variations in 3 days instead of 3 weeks.
We pushed changes on the web and synced entitlements via our subscription service so the app recognized purchases fast.
If you want speed use a platform that updates funnels without new builds.
We saved a noticeable chunk of margin and users liked the longer pages.
Make sure your web-to-app link and entitlement sync are rock solid before you scale.
You save margin but expect identity friction
Treat the web paywall as a parallel product. You must design a reliable handoff: capture the email or device identifier at checkout, write a server endpoint that redeems the purchase and pushes the entitlement to your subscription provider, then have the app poll or receive a push to unlock access.
Also automate VAT and refund logic early. The margin gains vanish if refunds and tax handling are manual and slow.
Finally run small controlled cohorts to compare retention and LTV before you flip full traffic to web.
We split traffic 10/90 initially and tracked net revenue per new user.
That helped us see the real benefit after refunds and VAT. It looked good fast so we expanded.
One tip: make the web checkout copy mirror the app UX. It reduces confusion when users jump to the app to use the product.
Start small and validate the sync before sending ad spend.
Expect more ops work early but higher margin later.