Paddle Billing
ProfitWell MetricsThis article is part of our series on web monetization for app businesses. Following Paddle and Helium’s MAU session on App2Web, Zach Witzel shares what he is seeing in the market, why great web flows are tested rather than copied, and what app teams should consider as they start experimenting across app and web.
Before I started Helium, I spent five years at Uber leading algorithmic pricing. We built systems that adjusted prices dynamically based on elasticity signals, demand patterns, and behavioral data. Some of those experiments generated hundreds of millions of dollars in incremental revenue.
Then I started working in mobile apps and discovered that most developers are operating with a fraction of the monetization levers available to any halfway-sophisticated e-commerce business. The tooling ecosystem – the infrastructure for testing, optimizing, and iterating on how you charge for your product – is, in my view, about a decade behind where other industries are.
That gap is starting to close. But most app companies aren’t moving fast enough to take advantage of it.
Benefits beyond fee arbitrage
Much of the discussion around web monetization focuses on avoiding the 30% App Store fee. The reality is, you can make much more than those savings. Those that sell via the web well typically experience:
- Higher conversion;
- Much higher trial conversion;
- Better retention; and
- Better take rate (94% not 70%).
But if you’re thinking about web primarily as fee arbitrage, you’re underestimating the opportunity.
The more important benefit is what you can do on the web that you simply can’t do in the App Store.
Think about what flexible billing actually means in practice. On the web, you can turn around a pricing change in hours, not days. You can run experiments across thousands of SKUs. You can offer trials with structures the App Store doesn’t support. You can create downgrade flows and cancellation intercepts that give users a reason to stay. You can build sponsored subscription models – where one user buys a subscription for someone else – which for some businesses represent a meaningful portion of revenue but are extremely hard to construct inside App Store constraints.
We’ve already launched some of these experiments with our customers. The results are compelling. And we think we’re still in the early innings of what’s possible.
What good App2Web looks like
The Duolingo flow is the best example of App-to-Web done right, and it’s worth dissecting in detail.
When you tap the upgrade CTA inside Duolingo (US users can check this right now on their phones), you’re taken to a browser. But the experience doesn’t feel like you’ve left the app. The design is mobile-native. There’s no credit card entry – Apple Pay is the primary payment method, and for many users, it’s the only one they see. The whole thing feels seamless because it’s been designed to feel seamless.
A few things make this work. First, they slow the user down before they even get to checkout – no immediate CTA, animations that guide attention top to bottom, content that makes you think through what you’re getting. We’ve seen that animation approach alone produce 20%+ conversion lifts. Second, they’ve been thoughtful about who gets routed to web: if you have Apple Pay, you’re a good candidate. If you don’t, you might not be.
And critically, if you tap back and return to the app, you land on an in-app paywall. Not a dead end. The fallback is built in, because in-app purchasing is genuinely the best experience for some users, and you want to capture them too.
The outcome, when implemented properly: flat conversion rates versus the in-app-only baseline, with a substantial improvement in net proceeds. Often combined with better trial conversion and retention on top. There’s real upside here, and in the cases we’re seeing, very little downside.
Why you have to test everything
Here's the thing I want to be honest about: there is no universal playbook for App-to-Web. This is where a lot of companies go wrong.
The joke I sometimes make is that yes, you should look at your competitors’ paywalls and take inspiration. I would say 80% of the time, if you take an element from a large company's paywall and apply it to yours, it'll work. But you don't know which 80%. And 20% of those borrowed tactics will not work – some of them will actively hurt you.
You might be a smaller app without the same trust profile as Duolingo, or an ad-driven app borrowing from an organic one, or a health app copying a productivity paywall. The context changes everything. What converts brilliantly in one environment can destroy conversion in another.
What I can tell you from our data is this: the variance in outcomes between different approaches to the same App-to-Web experience is enormous. We’re already seeing improvements in net proceeds on the order of 20-60% when companies implement web flows well – and we think that's still underestimating the potential. But the reverse is equally true: a poorly implemented flow, or one that's been copy-pasted without testing, can actively hurt your numbers. The difference between getting this right and getting it wrong is not marginal.
That means experimentation isn't optional. It's the whole game.
If you’re paying Apple’s 30%, you need to try App2Web
If you’re in Apple’s Small Business Program, the calculus is different. The 15% fee rate changes the margin math considerably, and I’d recommend most of your traffic stays in in-app purchasing for now. Focus on getting the fundamentals right.
But if you've graduated from the Small Business Program, or are approaching the threshold, the opportunity is substantial. A huge proportion of the top apps in the US App Store have largely figured this out already. And the gap between companies who move on this now and those who wait is going to widen. The tooling is maturing, and the direction of travel is clearer, but implementation choices still matter. The companies that build expertise in multi-channel monetization first will have a compounding advantage that has very little to do with fees.
Paddle and Helium help app teams test, optimize, and scale web monetization across app and web. Learn more about the partnership.
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