# One Line on My Paywall Got 57% More People to Pay. Then I Killed It. Author: Onur Uğur Language: en Source: https://bytswise.com/blog/coffee-paywall-ab-test/ Published: 2026-10-27 I ran a 10-day paywall test on Ombra, my AI tattoo app. One sentence lifted paying users by 57%. I shipped it to everyone. Three weeks later I removed it, and that was the right call. ![Hand-drawn bar chart: normal paywall at 5.4% next to a red 'less than a coffee' bar at 8.4%, a +57% arrow between them, and a coffee cup marked ₺225 with the note 'then I killed it'.](https://bytswise.com/media/blog/coffee-paywall-ab-test/cover.webp) ## Key takeaways - Paying users went from 5.4% (25 of 464) to 8.4% (39 of 462) with one line: it costs less than a coffee. - The coffee screen itself converted exactly like the old one: 3.70% vs 3.71%. The whole win came from the discount offer shown after closing it. - The coffee paywall only sold the weekly plan. In 30 days, yearly sales were zero. - Before you ship a winner, find the step that actually moved, and check which plans your users never see. I ran a simple test on [Ombra](https://ombratattoo.com/), my AI tattoo cover-up app. Half of Turkish users saw my normal paywall. The other half saw the same price with one new line: **it costs less than a coffee.** 10 days. 926 users. - Normal paywall: **5.4%** paid. - Coffee paywall: **8.4%** paid. That's **57% more paying users** from one sentence. I shipped it to everyone the next day. Three weeks later, I removed it. ## Why one sentence works There's a name for it. When you frame a price as a tiny everyday cost, people compare it to small things they already buy, not to other subscriptions ([Gourville, 1998](https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jconrs/v24y1998i4p395-408.html)). A weekly plan next to a coffee feels like nothing. ## Why I killed a winning paywall When I broke the funnel down step by step, the story changed. ![Two hand-drawn boxes. Step 1, the paywall: 3.70% vs 3.71%, coffee vs normal, a tie. Step 2, the "wait!" offer: ₺200 to ₺100, where all of the extra buyers came from. Below: the yearly plan was never shown, 0 yearly sales in 30 days.](https://bytswise.com/media/blog/coffee-paywall-ab-test/funnel.webp "The coffee screen tied. The offer after it did the work.") **The coffee screen itself converted exactly like the old one: 3.70% vs 3.71%.** The whole win came from the next screen, the discount offer people see when they close the paywall. My best guess: once people had seen ₺200 next to a coffee, the ₺100 offer looked like a steal. That's classic anchoring. The first number you see pulls every judgment after it ([Tversky & Kahneman, 1974](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17835457/)). And the coffee screen had a hidden cost. **It only sold the weekly plan.** In 30 days, about 96% of my traffic never saw a yearly option. Yearly sales: **zero**. That matters more than it sounds. Weekly plans convert better, but a year later only 5.5% of weekly subscribers are still paying, against 19.9% of yearly ones ([Adapty, 2026](https://adapty.io/blog/weekly-monthly-annual-subscription-plan/)). Zero yearly sales isn't a detail. It's a leak. So I rebuilt the paywall: a before/after cover-up image, yearly and weekly side by side, yearly preselected. ## Three things I'd check on your paywall 1. **Find the step that actually moved.** A test that says "B won" tells you nothing about why. Your winning screen might not be the winner. 2. **Look for the plan nobody sees.** One-plan paywalls quietly kill yearly revenue. 3. **Don't change price mid-test.** I doubled my Turkish weekly price (₺100 to ₺200) in the middle of this one. It muddied the data. And decide your sample size before you start, so you don't stop the moment it looks good ([Evan Miller](https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html)). *The small print, because you'd ask: 39 of 462 vs 25 of 464 buyers, p = 0.067. A strong signal, not lab-grade proof.* ## Frequently asked questions ### Was the result statistically significant? Not quite. 39 of 462 vs 25 of 464 gives p = 0.067, just above the usual 0.05 line. It was a strong, consistent signal, not lab-grade proof, and I rolled it out knowing that. ### What did the coffee line actually say? It compared the weekly price to a coffee in Turkey, where the test ran (Turkish App Store prices only). The anchor price on screen was ₺225 against a ₺200 weekly plan. ### What replaced the coffee paywall? One paywall: a before/after cover-up image at the top, four feature lines, yearly and weekly plans side by side with yearly preselected, and one button. The real yearly price is always visible. ## Sources - [Gourville (1998), Pennies-a-Day: The Effect of Temporal Reframing on Transaction Evaluation, Journal of Consumer Research 24(4)](https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jconrs/v24y1998i4p395-408.html) - [Tversky & Kahneman (1974), Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Science](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17835457/) - [Adapty, Weekly vs. monthly vs. annual: which plan type should you offer? (2026)](https://adapty.io/blog/weekly-monthly-annual-subscription-plan/) - [Evan Miller, How Not To Run an A/B Test](https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html) ## Want this kind of look at your paywall? A Growth Teardown is a 10–15 minute video of where your app leaks money and what to fix first. Founding price for the first five apps. [Get a teardown](https://bytswise.com/work-with-me/)