Couchsurfing Membership

Subscription fatigue affects over 40% of consumers (C+R Research) and the average person is already paying for more subscriptions than they can name. We had a paywall, and it needed to be one people would actually say yes to.

The brief I wrote for myself at the start of the research was actionable insights for higher conversion while protecting user trust, and I care about the second half as much as the first.

I benchmarked the four standard models against public data (Adapty, RevenueCat, Userpilot) before drawing anything.

A good chunk of the opt-out trial's conversion is people who did not mean to buy, and it comes back as refunds and support tickets. Apple and Google also flag apps that hide trial terms.

The hard paywall was in place when I arrived. I proposed other models for the paid countries alongside the freemium work for the free ones, and laid out the cost of the gate as the benchmark shows it, bounce and store ranking included. The company chose to keep the gate. The reframe changed everything inside it: what the screen sells, how it says it, the plans and the default. The model itself was the one decision in this work that was not mine.

One thing that kept standing out in the research was the split between subscriptions and memberships. Subscription models score highest on revenue impact and low on acceptance. Premium communities score nearly as well on revenue and much higher on acceptance.

My note on the board at the time was to pitch this as a community membership rather than a subscription for a piece of software, and that ended up setting the headline and the CTA. The button says Join Community, because the public research on community paywalls pointed that way over Subscribe or Join Now. Memberships also tend to renew better than subscriptions (Costco raised its fee in 2024 for the first time in seven years and renewal held at 92%), which matters more to us than the first conversion does. When I arrived the tracking was in its infancy and there was no baseline from the old app to read renewals against, so the first months could only measure what the new paywall did on first conversion, and nobody could own renewal yet.

The research agreed on five rules, and the paywall keeps all five.

The CEO has strong opinions and not a lot of bandwidth for open-ended reviews, so a deck of six finished paywalls would probably have gotten me a meeting next week rather than a decision. I needed something he could get through in one sitting and come out the other end of with a direction.

So I built a choose your own adventure. Every decision was a fork with two to four options and a real screen behind each one, and the last click landed on a paywall.

He got through it in one meeting. His notes came back specific, twice on the same page: not enough glow Brandon. Glow went in.

I built the three-month plan as a decoy. The research on decoy pricing does not replicate well, so the third plan probably does not push anyone toward annual. It gives people who will not commit to a year somewhere to land, and it lets the annual sit as the default on its own. Popular is the only label on the screen, beside the annual default and the saving. It was set before any data came in, and it marks the plan the business wants chosen. Once live, monthly was the most-picked plan, so in hindsight the label should say Best Value. That is true of annual and it does the same job. It needs no explaining.

The annual default itself was deliberate and I would set it the same way again. Most companies default to annual for what it does to lifetime value, and I researched that before choosing it. A monthly default protects the person who did not mean to commit to a year and costs the business the longer customer. The business took the annual default with that risk in view. The perk list under the plans is sized to the screen. A short phone shows three lines, the rule from the research, and a taller one shows more so the screen is not half empty. The lines fill the height. They are not what sells it.

Three variants went live. A has the membership headline with the community photo, B is Find Your Community with laurels either side of it, over the same photo, and C is Join the Inner Circle with two plans stacked instead of three across. Same rules and a community photo on all three. A and B share the layout and the photo, so between them the bet was on the headline treatment, the words and the laurels together, and the result does not say which of the two did the work; C tests the headline and the layout together. The photo itself was tested on its own: several images ran, and the community ones did best, people together at a table with a view behind them. That photo is the social proof above the fold. People together is what the membership sells. I wanted member quotes and did not have permission to use them, and press quotes sold less than people did, so the press became a one-line marquee under the fold.

B converted highest, and Find Your Community is the one in the app today, in the recording above. The paywall is a hard one, meaning a member in a paid country cannot get past it into the app, and it only appears in onboarding. Freemium covers the countries where a hard paywall is not allowed. The first dismiss in a paid country also gets an exit offer. My pitch was a discount, 40% off. Seven days free won the room because the trial logic already existed from the dormant campaign, so it was the cheaper build. It had not been built when I left. The dormant and abandoned-cart campaigns are separate.

The offer for dormant users: welcome back, a lot has happened, a month free, then the annual price, with the price and the length of the free month under every slide and a reminder before the charge. That reminder is the line between this and the trial I cut. It goes out by email only, the channel least likely to reach someone who has stopped opening the app, so I argued for a second one inside the app, with the refund and ticket evidence behind it, and lost.

Once it was live, monthly was the most-picked plan, and a lot more people than I expected picked the three-month plan I had built as the decoy. I had written that plan off as somewhere to land. People chose it. The industry benchmarks do not even report a three-month plan as a category, so I have a data point most paywalls never see. The other thing I would measure is who picks quarterly and whether they renew, because a plan that maps to a trip is a different product from a decoy.