20k+ downloads but only a few hundred dollars a month. I finally found where the money dies. What would you fix next?
Quick numbers from my app. 20k+ downloads and growing every week, but the revenue doesn't match: a few hundred dollars a month. For a long time I blamed "bad markets". Turns out the markets were fine and I was the problem.
India is my biggest paywall market. 2,147 people saw the paywall in the last 90 days and 69% of them tapped buy. That's higher intent than my US users (51%). Then almost all of them vanished at the payment sheet. Of everyone who tapped buy, about 1 in 20 actually paid. In the US it's 1 in 3.
For months I told myself "India just doesn't pay for apps" and moved on. The US side converted fine so I never dug deeper.
Then I converted my store prices back to USD and felt pretty stupid. My "localized" pricing was just currency conversion. Almost every country was paying within 20% of the American price. Bangladesh was the one that broke me. Literally my poorest market, paying more per year than Americans. My $90 annual, adjusted for purchasing power in India, is like asking an American to pay $700 for a subscription.
They weren't refusing to pay. They were being rational.
So I rebuilt the whole thing this month: weekly plan first instead of the annual, real purchasing power pricing per country, and a cheap one time unlock for anyone who dismisses the subscription. If it works, India becomes my second US at the same traffic.
Full funnel writeup with all the numbers: chadme.app/journey/the-india-paywall-experiment
Revenue (verified): verified.revenuecat.com/chadme
What would you fix next? And curious if anyone else dug into a "bad market" and found out the price was the problem the whole time.