As a first-time dev I get why apps charge weekly. As a user, I hate it.
If an app needs 5 minutes of questions before it shows me what it does, I already know it's about to ask for my money.
I'm building my first app, so lately I've been on both sides of this, and I don't love what I've learned.
As a user, what drives me crazy is the onboarding. Ten questions about my goals and habits, a progress bar "building my personal plan", a 5-star review from "Jessica, 34", and then a paywall. Most of the time none of it changes what the app actually does. It's there so that by the time I see the price, I've already put in five minutes and quitting feels like wasting them. It's a sunk cost trick, and it's so common now that I can spot it from the first question.
Then there's weekly pricing. I downloaded a photo cleaner last week. To be fair it gave me 7 days free, but after that it's $10 a week. I clean up my camera roll maybe once every few months. I've never met a single person who wants to pay for an app every week. Weekly plans exist because people forget to cancel.
Now the other side, because users aren't innocent either. Since I started building, I get why everyone ends up with subscriptions. A lot of apps have AI in them now, and every time someone uses it, the developer pays for it. A one-time $5 doesn't cover that for long. We want everything free, we hate ads, we won't pay upfront, and then we're surprised when the app we liked shuts down.
Spotify is the example I keep coming back to. I used the free version with ads for a long time before I paid. The free version was actually good, and the ads were just annoying enough to make me want to pay. By the time I upgraded I was using it every day, so paying felt obvious. They've raised the price more than once since then and I never thought about leaving. Years of my playlists live there. That's lock-in too, but it's lock-in I built myself, not something they tricked me into on day one.
I think that's the whole difference. People don't mind paying. They mind being charged rent by an app they've known for five minutes.
So I'm curious from both sides.
So I'm curious. If you build apps, what's actually worked for you? Did a free tier or a longer trial help, or did it just kill conversion? And if you run a weekly plan, please defend it, I really want to understand.
And as a user, what's the fastest an app has ever lost you? Mine was the Jessica screen.