I Built a RevenueCat Paywall That Doesn’t Hold the First Lesson Hostage

Building a subscription system for a language learning app, Slovo, presented a unique challenge. The app's philosophy is low pressure, with a daily word as the primary teaching method. An aggressive paywall after onboarding would contradict this, so I chose to make the first paywall optional, ensuring the free daily word remained useful. This approach aligns with RevenueCat as the Subscription Source of Truth, where a single premium entitlement configures the app's premium state.

The core check determines if a user is premium or in a trial state, which in turn gates premium features throughout the app. To avoid using a locally stored "purchased" Boolean, I rely on RevenueCat's customer information to decide access. Slovo's custom SwiftUI paywall was designed to match the app's warm, editorial style while still pulling the current offering from RevenueCat. It displays localized prices, introductory trial information, and handles purchases, cancellations, and restores.

The paywall reveals two main product states: free and premium. The free state offers a daily word and basic learning features, while the premium state provides deeper retention tools like audio, reading, and widgets. The annual package is intended for learners who want a long-term habit, while the monthly package reduces the commitment for those exploring the premium features.

To test the paywall's effectiveness, I plan to run an experiment comparing two value explanations: feature framing (unlimited vocabulary, reviews, audio, and widgets) versus outcome framing (remember useful Russian with one daily lesson and spaced reviews). The goal is to determine which explanation leads to more annual trials, as this will reveal whether the subscription is seen as a feature or a long-term learning system.

The results will come from subscription data, not user preferences. This approach, enabled by RevenueCat, allowed me to make the product decisions more visible and test the subscription system more effectively.