Supporting Tolan’s successful transition to freemium
Tolan was shifting from a hard paywall to freemium. Over the course of a year, we led work to optimize subscription pricing, packaging, and paywalls that helped maintain healthy unit economics while rapidly accelerating subscriber growth.
Tolan
Friendly AI guide
Subscriber conversion
cumulative impact
ARPU
from a single paywall test
Challenge
After initially launching with a hard paywall, Tolan determined that a freemium model would accelerate its growth but result in a short-term hit to monetization. They needed a roadmap to help them seamlessly transition to freemium in a way that maximized upside while also mitigating any downside risk to subscriber conversion and ARPU.
Solution
Working directly with Tolan’s leadership team, we led multiple workstreams to ensure a successful freemium transition:
- Conducted pricing and packaging surveys to ground decisions in feature preferences and willingness-to-pay
- Ran dozens of in-product A/B tests to optimize pricing across multiple subscription tiers and IAPs
- Completed paywall, upsell, and cancellation flow optimizations, including a single A/B test that drove +40% ARPU
- Improved new user onboarding, sharing, and referral flows to maximize viral K-factor and accelerate organic growth
- Redesigned lifecycle marketing campaigns to deepen engagement and boost subscriber conversion and retention
Cumulatively, this work helped Tolan improve subscriber conversion +200%. The company’s transition to freemium proved to be a massive success, reaccelerating subscriber growth while maintaining best-in-class monetization rates.
“We loved working with Elemental Growth to support our freemium strategy and execute dozens of pricing, packaging, and paywall tests to help make it successful.”
