Listen, I don’t do clickbait titles often, but I recently read this old post by Craig Campbell about titles and I decided I’d give it a shot. That said, this article will hopefully still be useful and interesting. And the title ain’t wrong.

The screenshot above is from my AppStore Connect account’s analytics for an app I built called Write/Sprint. If you take a look at the total downloads, you can see that the increase is 3730% over the previous period. That’s insane, right? What could have caused this? Was it ads? An influencer? Luck?

It was none of those things, but to explain what actually happened, we have to go back to the beginning.

In late 2020, I was bored. It was COVID lockdown time still. I was contracting for Pinata before I became a full-time employee, and I had spent some time building a React Native mobile app as part of that work. I liked building mobile, but I wanted to see what the fuss was all about with SwiftUI, Apple’s native language for apps. So I decided to build a native app using Swift and SwiftUI. What would the app be, though?

To answer that, we have to rewind a couple of more years. Early in my coding journey (about one or two years in) I wanted to learn how to build desktop apps with Electron. I had the idea for a simple timer app. People would be able to set a length of time they wanted to write, they’d be able to enter their starting word count and ending word count, and they could keep track of writing sprints. I built this app as a tray app for macOS. It was cool. My writer friends used it, I learned Electron, and I had a new app under my belt.

When it was time to pick the app I’d build for iOS, I realized my old timer app was a perfect fit. The tray app on desktop was cool, but people write everywhere: phones, tablets, paper, etc. A mobile app would have better notification functionality as well for when a sprint timer ended. So, that’s what I built.

When I was finished, I was going through a phase where I was tired of giving my work away for free. So, I knew I wasn’t going to launch the app in the App Store for free. I decided a $0.99 price tag felt fair. I launched it, created a little website, and forgot about it (aside from using it myself for my writing sprints).

Over the years, I made some tweaks here and there. I learned that it’s actually really hard to get notified of reviews on the App Store, so I responded to months (and year-plus) old comments. I fixed bugs that were pointed out. And all the while, my little app sold copies here and there. It felt good to make money from a native iOS app. The money didn’t even cover coffee or beer, but I can say I sold hundreds of copies of the app in three years.

Early this year, I wanted to see what running App Store Search Ads would be like. I ran a $50 campaign on Write/Sprint to see if it would generate some sales.

It did not.

As you can see, when I’m curious about something, I tend to just dive in rather than read and research too much 😬. So, naturally, when I wanted to see what in-app subscriptions were like with Apple and Xcode, I figured Write/Sprint would be a great testing ground. But, I already charged for the app. How could I then layer on subscriptions? That didn’t make sense. The logical conclusion, of course, was to make the app free, build new features, and paywall those features behind the subscriptions.

We do things iteratively here in the house of chaos (read: my upstairs office), so I went to my account dashboard for Write/Sprint and I made the app free. Then I got to work on building the features that I would paywall and learning how to add in-app subscriptions to an iOS app.

But a funny thing happened. People started downloading my app. A lot. I had about 200 total downloads in more than 3 years. In the first two days after removing the $0.99 paywall, I had nearly 300 downloads when it was all said and done.

I hadn’t considered $0.99 that much of a barrier and often thought my app just wasn’t all that compelling. Maybe it still isn’t, but at least more people are willing to give it a try. This increase in downloads also means that when I do add new features, I have both a larger audience for feedback and more opportunity when the subscription flow rolls out.

Developers and consumers alike often lament the rise of subscriptions versus one-time payments, but one-time payments are limiting in a variety of ways. In hindsight, I wish I had launched Write/Sprint without a paywall at the beginning. I would have had significantly more motivation to continue improving it instead of reigniting that fire after 3 years.

So how did I increase downloads by nearly 4000%? I made my app free. Simple 🙃.