Design your freemium so users reach value fast while unit economics stay healthy. Use cohort analysis, GA4 key events, and pricing gates to turn activation into paid retention.
In GA4 (2025), tracking free‑to‑paid reliably starts with marking which items as key events?
Bounce events on the home page
Vanity page views only
Upgrade milestones like subscription_start and successful_charge
Campaign UTM parameters
Which metric best protects life‑cycle profitability when scaling a freemium motion?
Raw sign‑up volume
Average session duration in the first week
Total ad impressions
Payback period on fully‑loaded CAC
A common freemium anti‑pattern is ______.
guarding premium features with usage limits
a free tier so generous that upgrade triggers are rarely hit
using contextual in‑product prompts during high‑intent tasks
onboarding to an early aha moment
To estimate LTV for a subscription, teams typically combine ______.
data center rack units owned
click‑through rate and CPM
ARPU, gross margin %, and expected customer lifetime
gross bookings and social followers
Which analysis best reveals whether upgrades are improving by product age, not just seasonality?
time‑on‑site by day of week only
cohort analysis by signup month with upgrade curves
a single blended conversion rate
share of voice in social channels
When free usage spikes but paid conversion lags, the first lever to test is often ______.
adding unrelated vanity metrics to dashboards
turning off billing telemetry for performance
tightening or repositioning the upgrade gates
cutting observability budgets
Which pricing pattern helps convert power users without scaring casuals?
one flat price for all usage
pricing by email domain length
charging only for logins
usage‑based or tiered thresholds tied to high‑value actions
For freemium email capture, which experiment is most likely to lift paid upgrades later?
random feature tours without a goal
onboarding flows that drive an aha moment before the paywall
multi‑minute brand videos before any interaction
long legal disclaimers as the first screen
Which profitability view prevents over‑optimism when discounts are heavy?
gross sign‑up counts only
impressions served per dollar
contribution margin after discounts and transaction fees
number of features released
A safe rollout pattern for new paywalls is to ______.
flip for all users at once with no rollback
gate randomly so cohorts are incomparable
announce limits but keep billing disabled for months
ship behind flags and expand with telemetry‑based thresholds
Starter
Solid start. Re-check your activation metric, GA4 key events, and whether your free tier is too generous.
Solid
You’re close. Fine-tune aha moments, upgrade nudges, and payback period targets by cohort.
Expert!
Excellent. You’re balancing conversion, margin, and retention across the full subscriber life cycle.
