About a month ago, I wrote a post about my ideas for improving the monetisation of my app (give it a read if you haven’t). Now, a month later, I’ve done the implementation and things have progressed and changed a bit since then.
Time limited benefits
After I wrote the post and before starting the implementation, I sat down and worked out all of the economics of what I was trying to achieve. Long story short, there is very little benefit in time-limiting some functionality. Even my smallest tip covers more than 2 years worth of advertising revenue per person. Therefore, I decided after doing these calculations, that I would simple turn off ads permanently for anyone who ever tipped me.
Subscription model
During the implementation, I found that there is a bit of work to be done to upgrade or downgrade someone’s subscription on Android if they’ve previously subscribed. This complication made me deprioritise the subscription in my initial implementation, but most of the code is there and it would probably not take more than 30 minutes to enable. For now though, the decision was made to have no subscription model.
The result
This screen should give a good idea of what I ended up with.
The financial result
It might be too early to tell, but the results so far are encouraging. The movement is slow, but it’s isn’t as slow as it was with my paid app. This is meant to replace my paid app, so I compare the result to that. So far, since I launched my in-app purchases, my revenue is double that of my best month of my paid app. It’s not a difficult record to beat, since it is less that my most expensive tip, but the word to use is encouraging!
Something else which is different from my planning is that I had assumed that most people would choose the small tip, a few would choose the medium one and I would probably never see the bigger ones being used. Almost the opposite has happened – in my small sample, I’ve had use of the two bigger tips, so again, the word to use is encouraging.
Feel free to reach out to me if you want to know more about what I’ve done. I’m always happy to share experiences.