Amanda Maricle is the Product Owner at Nami ML. She has an extensive background in app development and most recently product managed the Connect mobile app platform at HomeSpotter.
1. Calculate for Your Users How Much Their Plan Will Cost Monthly or Compared to Other Products
Understanding the true cost of a subscription plan is a critical factor for users when deciding whether to commit to a service. By calculating and displaying the monthly cost of a plan, users can easily assess its affordability within their budget. This practice not only enhances transparency but also helps users make informed decisions.
Additionally, comparing the monthly cost with an annual plan's cost can highlight potential savings, making the annual plan more appealing. While they may not initially want to commit to a longer term plan, seeing clear savings can be compelling.
For example, if a monthly plan costs $10 per month and the annual plan is $100, users can immediately see that they would save $20 by choosing the annual option. This straightforward comparison can be a compelling incentive, as users often appreciate the opportunity to save money, even if it means committing to a longer-term plan.
While [users] may not initially want to commit to a longer term plan, seeing clear savings can be compelling.
Why Monthly Cost Matters
Most users think in terms of monthly budgets. Displaying the cost per month can make your product seem more affordable and easier to justify within their monthly expenses.
Implementation Tips
Dynamic Pricing Information: Use tools like Nami paywalls that have Smart Text variables to automatically calculate and display monthly savings.
Visual Comparisons: Use charts or graphs to visually represent cost savings between monthly and annual plans.
2. Don’t hide billing terms
While it can be tempting to just provide the price broken down by month, for an annual product users will be billed once every year, not monthly. So when the user is billed once for a larger amount than was advertised on the product (the monthly price), they will be surprised and upset. Being misleading about billing frequency can lead to support issues and refunds that are avoidable, violating paywall best practices.
Transparency in billing terms helps build trust with your users. Misleading billing practices can not only lead to churn but also damage your app’s reputation.
Implementation Tips
Clear Billing Descriptions: Clearly state the billing frequency next to the price. For example, "Billed annually at $120 ($10/month)".
FAQ Sections: Include an FAQ section on the paywall that answers common billing questions.
Visual Cues: Use icons or symbols to represent billing cycles clearly.
3. Clearly Indicate Trial Length
Users like to test out services before committing to purchase. Clearly indicating how much time they get in a free trial will help overcome buyer concerns and convert more users. This is a crucial paywall best practice.
If your products have different trial lengths, you should make that clear so that the user isn’t surprised. Unclear trial length is an easy way to get an unhappy customer or a refund request.
Free trials reduce the perceived risk for users, making them more likely to try your service. However, unclear trial lengths can lead to frustration and mistrust.
Implementation Tips
Trial Length in CTA: Incorporate the trial length into the Call to Action (CTA) button, such as "Start your 1-week free trial".
Countdown Timers: Use a countdown timer to show how much time is left in the trial.
Reminder Emails: Send reminder emails towards the end of the trial period to prompt users to subscribe.
Badges can help highlight the most popular or best value product, making the decision process easier for users and driving them towards the option you prefer.
Implementation Tips
Highlight Savings: Use badges to highlight savings, such as "Save 20%".
Social Proof: Use badges like "Most Popular" or "Best Value" to leverage social proof.
Color Contrast: Ensure the badge color contrasts well with the rest of the paywall to draw attention.
👉🏻 Looking for examples of paywalls with product badges? The Nami paywall gallery has hundreds of paywalls from top apps to explore.
5. Don’t show more than 3 Products on a Paywall
Users are viewing your paywall from their mobile device and trying to decide if they want to pay for your service, and if so, how much and how often. While it is tempting to display all your product options in one view so that users have flexibility, rarely is this a good idea in practice.
Even if you do offer weekly, 1 month, 3 month, 6 month, and 12 month products, displaying them all on 1 small screen can give a user decision paralysis. They have to compare 5 different products and prices and try to decide how long they will want to use the service and whether they will remember to cancel.
Try setting up a paywall featuring just the annual product and track the conversion rate. Then test it against a paywall with both 1 month and 12 month options. How many users are buying the 1 month product versus the 12 month? How long do you retain the 1 month users?
Too many options can overwhelm users, leading to decision paralysis where they end up not choosing any option at all.
Implementation Tips
Limit Choices: Offer no more than three product options on the paywall.
Highlight Differences: Clearly highlight the differences between the available options.
User Testing: Conduct user testing to determine the optimal number of choices for your audience. With a software like NamiML you can run A/B testing for all your paywall in minutes.
Your mobile app paywall is a critical component in driving revenue. By following these paywall best practices, such as clearly indicating trial lengths, using badges to draw attention, and not overwhelming users with too many options, you can optimize your paywall for better conversion rates and user satisfaction.
Looking for more tips on paywalls? Submit your paywall for personalized advice from our team.
There are dozens of metrics and data points available in the subscription app world. But that can be very overwhelming! Which ones should you keep an eye on and why are they important? In this article we cover more than 15 subscription app analytics you should start tracking.
Here is Nami’s guide to the most important subscription app metrics that you should know about.
Purchase Types
An important factor to consider when looking at app metrics is what type of purchases you support.
The main types of purchases are:
subscriptions
non-consumable one-time purchase (such as a lifetime ad-free purchase)
consumable one-time purchase (such as a purchase of coins for a game)
Subscriptions are recurring while non-consumables and consumables are not.
Different purchase types will impact your revenue metrics differently, as we will discuss below. If you have a mix of in-app purchase types, you may need to look at multiple metrics to get a clear picture of your revenue.
User Types
Just like purchase types, there are a few types of users you may want to track.
If your app has subscriptions, you will have subscriber users. These are typically your most engaged users and you will want to track their activity, retention, and more closely to monitor the health of your subscription business.
If your app supports non-consumable or consumable purchases, you will have paying users as well. A one-time purchase is a key indicator of engagement and you will want to focus on keeping these users engaged and purchasing again.
Finally, all users who install your app and use it are active users. These are leads who could potentially purchase. You will want to track the LTV and retention of these users to understand how to convert them into paying users.
Revenue
Revenue is an extremely important core metric that represents how much money you are making from your app. It sums up all purchases from the given time frame.
Revenue takes into consideration all types of purchases, including subscriptions, and consumable and non-consumable one-time purchases.
Sample Revenue Metric chart
MRR
MRR represents the normalized value of all your subscription customers. It is the most important metric for a subscription app analytics. Unlike revenue, it does not include one-time purchases, since these are not recurring. And unlike revenue, it doesn’t report the total amount of the purchase but rather the normalized monthly amount of the subscription.
For example, an annual subscription of $90 would have an MRR of 90/12 = $7.50. For every month that this customer is active, their MRR would be $7.50. On the revenue chart, this would be shown as a $90 transaction once.
MRR will often be lower than Revenue, but overall it gives you a better picture as to how your business is doing over time without the spikes of one-time purchases and large subscription transactions.
Sample MRR Metric chart
ARPU
ARPU (Average Revenue per User) can mean several different things depending on what Revenue you are looking at and which User Types you are including. Let’s look at 3 different calculations below.
Average MRR per Subscriber
Average MRR per Subscriber looks at only your active subscriber user group and your MRR. This metric is useful to understand the monthly recurring value of any individual subscriber.
By understanding this number, you can calculate how many more subscribers you need to get to a goal MRR number. Or you can try to increase this number by moving subscribers to higher priced subscription plans through upsell campaigns.
Average Revenue per Paying User (ARPPU)
Average Revenue per Paying User looks at all revenue for a time period and divides by all paying users. This takes into account one-time purchases as well as subscriptions and is a good combination metric for any app that sells multiple types of purchases.
By understanding this metric, you can measure how much users are willing to pay for your app and track reactions to pricing decisions.
Sample Average Revenue per Paying User chart
Average Revenue per User
Average Revenue per User looks at all revenue for a time period and divides by all active app users. This number will typically be much lower than ARPPU.
ARPU can be used to measure the overall effectiveness of a pricing strategy. If your ARPU is going up but your number of users is staying static, that means users are engaging more with the app and paying for your product.
Sample Average Revenue per App User chart
Active Users
Active Subscribers
This metric tracks all users who have an active subscription. Subscribers are your most engaged, valuable customers and tracking this number is important to keeping your subscription business healthy.
Metrics like New Subscribers, Trials, and Subscriber Churn are also useful to dive into how your subscriber base is changing over time.
Sample Active Subscribers chart
Active App Users
Active App Users are all users who have had an active session with your app during the time period. These will include subscribers, purchasers of consumables or non-consumables, or users who installed and used once and then churned.
Anyone who installs your app can be considered a lead at the top of the funnel. Your goal should be to drive them down the funnel towards a subscription.
If your Active App Users are increasing but your Active Subscribers are stagnant or decreasing, this can be a sign that you need to optimize your funnel.
Sample App Users chart
Subscriber Movement
Subscriber Movement is a visual of your subscriber base that helps show if your Active Subscribers are increasing or decreasing overall. It is calculated by taking New Subscribers and plotting against Churned subscribers who have expired their last subscription.
The Net of New subscribers - Churned subscribers is a visual of how much your Active Subscriber base is growing. If it is trending upwards, your business is in good shape. If it is negative, you are losing more subscribers than you are gaining.
Sample Subscriber Movement chart
User Churn
User Churn is an important metric that represents that rate at which you are losing users during a given period. While it is important to see the static number of subscribers and app users, as shown in the previous sections, it is also important to know how many you are losing, since this is another measure of health.
Subscriber Churn
Subscriber Churn indicates the rate at which your subscribers are expiring. It is calculated by taking (Expired Subscribers - Resubscribers) / Active Subscribers.
The higher your subscriber churn, the more work you need to do to gain new subscribers.
App User Churn
App User Churn is the percentage of users who uninstall or stop engage with your app over time. It is calculated by taking 1 - (Non new users this period / Total users last period).
App User Churn is the same as abandonment rate and can show you when users begin dropping off. Using this data, you can optimize your funnel at key drop off points or times to engage users and decrease churn.
MRR Movement
MRR Movement shows a visual of your net MRR and helps tell you if your MRR is increasing or decreasing overall. It is calculated by taking New MRR (from new subscribers being added) and charting against Churned MRR (from subscribers who expired all their subscriptions).
Some systems will also track Expanded MRR (from product SKU upgrades or price increases), Contracted MRR (from product SKU downgrades) and Reactivated MRR (from a former customer who resubscribed) as well.
The Net of New MRR - Churned MRR is a visual of how much your MRR is growing and should be tracked carefully to understand how healthy your subscription business is. If it is negative, your business is shrinking.
Sample MRR Movement chart
Revenue Churn
Revenue Churn tells you the rate at which you lost Revenue during the previous time period. It is calculated by 1 - (Non-new Revenue from current period / Revenue from previous period).
Sample Revenue Churn metric
MRR Churn
MRR Churn tells you the rate at which you lost recurring revenue. It is calculated by taking the MRR lost to downgrades & cancellations / MRR at start of period.
High MRR churn means that high value subscribers are leaving at a high rate. An ideal MRR Churn rate is negative, meaning you are gaining more subscribers than you are losing.
MRR Churn should be tracked with MRR Movement to give you a view into the future.
LTV
Lifetime Value (or LTV) is a measure of how much revenue you can expect to make from an average user throughout their lifecycle. LTV is critical to understanding how much you can invest in customer acquisition. If your LTV outweighs CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), your business might be in trouble.
Subscriber LTV
Subscriber LTV focuses on the total recurring revenue from a subscriber throughout their subscription lifecycle. It is calculated by taking Average MRR per Subscriber and dividing by Subscriber Churn.
This metric is a key to track for your subscription app analytics. It only looks at subscription users and recurring revenue. If a subscription user purchased a one-time product, this wouldn’t be included in their LTV.
App User LTV
App User LTV takes the total bucket of App Users and measures their Lifetime Value. This metric includes all purchases, recurring and one-time, and all users. As a result, it will be much lower than Subscriber LTV.
It is calculated by taking (Total Revenue / Active Users) and multiplying by App User Churn.
User Retention
Retention is the opposite of Churn. Retention helps to show you the average tenure of your customers and can expose where drop-off is happening in the funnel or which segments of customers are most likely to drop-off.
Subscriber Retention
For Subscriber Retention, calculate cohorts of new subscribers for each month in a period in the past. Then for each of these new subscriber cohorts, look 1+ months ahead and sum up all the subscribers that renewed during that next month.
Average Subscriber Retention is the average number of subscribers in a cohort divided by the average number that renewed.
Sample Average Subscriber Retention Rate chartSample Subscriber Retention Cohort chart
Final Thoughts on Subscription App Analytics
For app developers and publishers, subscription app analytics are extremely important to measure the health and growth of your app business. The 19 metrics described are key to keeping a pulse on your app audience and mobile revenue.
At Nami, we are constantly growing our product with reporting for these key analytics. Check back for more content on subscription app analytics and join our newsletter to hear about the latest product updates.
Team Nami has been hard at work with updates! Here are the latest additions to the platform which are now live:
Made improvements to subscription reporting on the Overview screen.
Launched the Android 2.0 SDK which is full of major improvements
Introduced a new Integrations section for managing Nami’s interface with third-party
Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.
📊 Subscriptions Report Card
We all want to know how many active subscriptions we have but that only tells a part of the story. Your subscriber base can be segmented across a number of dimensions to tell a more complete story.
That’s why we’ve rolled out a new Subscriptions Report Card that gives you a real-time report of the number of subscriptions with the following context:
Total Subscriptions
Active Paid Subscriptions
Subscriptions in Free Trial
Subscriptions in Intro Pricing
Paused Subscriptions
Subscriptions in Grace Period
Subscriptions in Account Hold
Subscriptions not renewing
With Subscriptions Report Card, get insight into your app's subscription journey states available on the Overview screen. To learn more, visit the docs.
🤖 Android 2.0
The latest Android release is full of features!
Nami's entitlement engine is now improved to handle subscription upgrades and downgrades
Options to sell new in-app purchases with lifetime one-time purchases and consumables
Localize your paywalls to sell your app in multiple languages
Improved TalkBack support for accessibility text to speech on our no-code paywalls
Learn more about the Nami Android 2.0 SDK, head over to the ChangeLog.
🔗 Integrations Screen
Connect Nami to your App Store or Google Play account plus other tools using our new Integrations screen.
Sync Nami subscriber data with 3rd party platforms such as mParticle, Wicket Labs, and Zendesk (coming soon). Importantly, you can also now setup and consume Nami context on your own backup by consuming our webhooks.
Nami is ending the year strong! We've released some great new security features including:
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
Enterprise organizational policies
🔑 2FA
Nami takes security very seriously, and we are proud to now be able to offer another layer of protection to your account through Two-Factor Authentication (2FA).
If you setup 2FA, logging into your Nami account will require a code from your authenticator app as well as your username and password.
Enterprises now have even more control over the safety of their Nami organization and the security of their team members with our configurable organization security policies.
Enterprise admins can configure these policies:
Expire Passwords
Lock Account After Failed Login Attempts
Disable Inactive Team Members
Control Center Session Lengths
These features are only available to users on our Enterprise plan. Contact us to setup a demo or upgrade your plan.
Have you ever wondered which mobile app platform you should develop for first? iOS or Android? That question is integral to your mobile application strategy. But it has a lot of variables that should be considered. Let’s have a look at what those variables are and what they mean.
iOS or Android Market Share
One of the most basic variables in the iOS or Android equation is general market share - how many mobile devices exist worldwide and how are they broken down by platform?
As of September 2021, Android holds the global market share, with 72.44% of devices. But there is a lot of variance by region of the world.
In the United States, iOS holds the market at 57.08% of devices, but in the United Kingdom, their hold is less secure, at only 51.62%.
When considering the platform for your new app, knowing the geographic region of your user base is extremely important. Otherwise you risk losing out on large groups of customers. For example, launching a new app on iOS only in India in 2021 probably wouldn’t be a good idea, as Android holds 95.79% of market share in that country.
No matter what markets you serve, don’t forget to tailor your app store’s page and paywall to users in that region.
Doing user research can be extremely valuable to determine if your app audience leans towards 1 platform or another. One simple way to do this is to set up a pre-launch website where users can sign up for launch updates. Include separate forms for iOS and Android and see how many users sign up for updates on each platform.
Unsurprisingly, even the way that your app generates revenue differs by platform. iOS users are typically more engaged with their apps, and are more willing to pay for a subscription. (The top 100 subscription apps on the App Store in 2020 made 3.8x as much revenue as the top 100 subscription apps on the Google Play Store.) An Android app will typically reach a wider audience, but a less engaged one that isn’t as tolerant of a subscription model. Instead they prefer free apps with ads.
Your platform choice then, also should be determined by your planned revenue model. If you plan on building a loyal subscriber base then iOS would be a good choice. But a monetization strategy based on ads only should start on Android. Our opinion on good practice: if a user has paid for a subscription, they expect not to see ads anymore. Try to keep these revenue models separate.
What about one-time in-app purchases? These have proven effective across both platforms, especially in the gaming industry. Try introducing one-time purchases of things like coins and skins on top of your ads on Android to capture more revenue at strategic times.
No matter how you decide to implement your revenue model, Nami can help. Setup subscriptions in minutes or implement one-time purchases with ease, or do both!
If you have to choose one mobile app platform to develop for, answering basic questions about your market, user types, and revenue model will help you determine whether to choose Android or iOS as your first app platform.
When it’s time to setup your app subscriptions or purchases, Nami is supported on native iOS and Android and can be implemented in minutes. Developing on a cross-platform framework? Nami also supports React Native, Flutter, and Xamarin.
Still not sure what platform to choose? Struggling to find a good app developer or dev shop? Confused about potential app revenue models? Book some time on our calendar.
We've had a busy summer! Take a look at what's new in the Nami ML platform from the last few months, including:
Create Paywalls in multiple languages
New Cloud Paywall Builder
Accessibility support
Big Enterprise feature update
Paywalls in Multiple Languages 🗺
Nami has been innovating to help grow your global business needs!
Promote different content in different countries
Customize paywalls by language and locale to tailor your message
Unlock a global audience of potential subscribers
Updated Cloud Paywall Builder 🖼
The paywall builder looks better than ever! Edit your paywalls easily from our newly designed sidebar editor and watch your paywall preview update in realtime.
We’ve designed our paywalls to work with screen readers solutions including VoiceOver on Apple and TalkBack and Select to Speak on Google Android.And you can even translate the screen reader text for localized paywalls!
See the new Localization and Accessibility features in action:
Enterprise Features 🏢
These features are only available to users on our Enterprise plan. Contact us to setup a demo or upgrade your plan.
Advanced Roles/Permissions
Invite users to your organization with limited access using our new roles and permissions controls.
Admin - Access everything
Support - Perfect for customer support teams that only need access to customer records
Viewer - Keep your Nami environment secure by limiting users that can make changes
Or contact Nami to customize roles with access that fits your business needs.
Nami now has API endpoints to access all the data in the 'Customers' screen. Use the API to:
Filter customers by platform or ID
View all data available for any specific customer
Access all events for a customer - including purchases, cancellations, trial period, and more
Dig into all revenue for a customer
Nami is now SOC 2 Compliant
Nami is invested in enterprise-class resources and processes. We have integrated continuous monitoring software and advanced data privacy practices to become SOC 2 compliant.
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We hope you find these updates useful and if you have any questions or feedback, please reach out.
