App makers · Trial conversion
350 users, seven free trials, zero revenue. What should you check first?
Work out how many trials reached their first billing date. Then separate the people who never saw the offer, the ones who declined renewal and any payments still in retry.
GimmeTheSauce editorial ·
Seven trial starts out of 350 users is 2%. That calculation answers a narrow question, and only if the seven belong to those same 350. It tells you nothing yet about how many people saw your paywall or whether anyone has had a chance to pay. Before changing the price, try to account for all seven trials.
Put the first billing date beside each trial
Take the seven production trial starts from one store and one offer. For each, record the start, expected first charge, renewal setting and latest store-confirmed transaction or billing status. Use anonymous IDs internally. Keep test purchases separate. A free trial can grant paid-tier access before collecting any money. Apple charges at the end of the trial, and a failed renewal can enter billing retry. Apple’s subscription billing guide
Consider this illustrative split. Five of the seven trials are still running. Of the two that reached their first billing date, one ended with renewal turned off and the other entered retry. Today’s ledger should show zero successful first payments. Five people have no payment outcome yet, and the retry could still recover. Calling this “0% conversion from seven completed trials” would put five unfinished observations in the denominator.
A different finding calls for a different fix. If the store shows a successful first paid transaction and your dashboard says zero, reconcile that transaction’s product, date range, environment and reporting delay before editing a single screen. For cohort comparisons, give trial starts the same follow-up time. RevenueCat’s trial conversion reporting groups trials by start date. RevenueCat’s chart definitions
Check who actually saw the offer
Suppose only 70 of the 350 people were eligible and saw the offer. If all seven starters came from those 70, then 7/70, or 10%, started a trial after seeing it. The overall user-to-trial rate is still 2%. Before calling either figure good or bad, look at why 280 users never entered the comparison. Some may already subscribe, some may have abandoned setup, and some may simply have had no reason to use the paid feature.
Pick one recent path through the app and follow it on a clean device. Does the user reach the thing they came for? When the offer appears, can they tell what the trial unlocks, what it costs afterward and when billing starts? Does the production purchase complete, and is the entitlement available afterward? Record the first step that fails.
Pick the fix your seven rows support
| What you find | What to do next |
|---|---|
| Most first charges are still in the future | Set a review date after the trials mature. Check whether users reach the promised benefit during the trial. |
| Users saw the offer but purchase attempts failed | Reproduce the purchase path and reconcile store events with your analytics. |
| Mature trials ended with renewal disabled | Ask a few users what they wanted to accomplish and where they stopped. Compare their answers with actual feature use. |
| Payments are in retry | Check billing state and recovery separately from voluntary cancellation. |
| The store collected money that your dashboard missed | Fix reporting and recheck the same transactions before judging conversion. |
With seven trials, one additional payer changes a seven-person rate by about 14 percentage points. That is enough reason to look at individual outcomes before declaring a winning paywall. The useful result of this exercise is a short list of things you can explain and one uncertainty your next batch of trials can resolve.