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Mobile app growth5 min read

Monetization: gaming, dating, subscription

Three models, three things to charge for: time, status, outcome. What teardowns reveal about the levers and the abuses.

The short version

A game sells time, a dating app sells status, a subscription sells an outcome. Pick one before touching the paywall.

  • Tinder prices visibility; the RSRR triggers the upsell.
  • Block Blast and Subway Surfers tune ads to predicted value.
  • Net revenue per payer decides what you can spend.
Block Blast ad revenue, Jan–May 2026
$127M
Candy Crush spend, 2024
$1.09B
left from $100k gross
$10k

Three monetization logics

Gaming

Trigger
Difficulty wall
Price logic
Consumables
Pressure
Loss of progress

Dating

Trigger
Desire and scarcity
Price logic
Personalised
Pressure
Time-limited offer

Subscription

Trigger
Value gate
Price logic
Tiered
Pressure
Feature lock
Same paywall, three different engines. Copying a mechanic without its trigger and price logic usually imports the pressure without the revenue.

Gaming: time and attention

What does a free-to-play game actually charge for?

A free-to-play game sells shortcuts inside a loop it controls. It earns from two sources, often mixed: advertising paid per impression, and in-app purchases paid to remove friction.

  • Block Blast. The teardown cites 127 million dollars in ad revenue from January to May 2026. A local XGBoost model estimates a player's ad value from phone model, country, ad history and settings such as vibration. The game then adjusts difficulty and reward pricing to that value. The rule RewardHighValueAdHarvestTrait applies a 3.5 multiplier to players who watch many ads, and the revive offer appears when the score matters most.
  • Subway Surfers. A 158-rule engine decides which ad to show, when and to whom, based on whether the player has paid, time since the last ad, sessions played and other games installed. Every impression is logged with placement, network, revenue and A/B test version. The rules are served as JSON, so they change without a release. The teardown cites SYBO's 2025 annual report and revenue above 60 million dollars.
  • Crossy Road. The first three gifts are worth 100 to 120 coins, then the average falls to around 31. The wait between spins grows from 3 to 180 minutes as you own more characters, and the chance of landing a missing character drops from 70 percent to 10 percent. A second ad can double the odds, and the spin price never shrinks with the gifts.
  • Candy Crush. 231 configurable parameters, color probabilities that adapt to the number of attempts, and player segments that do not receive the same rules. Players spent 1.09 billion dollars in the game in 2024, according to the teardown.

Dating: status and access

What does a free dating app charge for?

A dating app sells visibility in a market where attention is scarce, and it charges the people who want to improve their odds.

Tinder computes a desirability score, the RSRR, or right-swipe received ratio. Part of the calculation runs on-device through embedded models, and the score triggers offers: a popular profile gets a Super Like pitch tagged super_like.high_rsrr_upsell. The more desirable you are, the harder Tinder sells you the means to be seen more.

An embedded photo selector can scan up to 20,000 photos over two years to keep 27, and photo insights feed advice on the attributes that work. Mirror selfies reportedly triple the score in the cited data.

Charles Liu's second teardown found three transparency problems. Tinder shows a personalized price, with a notice saying an algorithm set it from account activity, device and location. The Secret Admirer mini-game reportedly decides the outcome before you pick a card. The counter shown during a Boost is rebuilt from elapsed time and random noise, with no direct link to the actual gain.

The structural lesson: when perceived value depends on a ranking, monetization means selling positions in that ranking. The ethical and legal risk grows with the gap between what the user thinks they buy and what they actually buy.

Subscription: an outcome

Where does a subscription paywall really start?

A subscription app sells a transformation: sleep better, speak a language, manage money. The paywall is the last step of a reasoning that starts in the first session.

The five-screen sequence is the one detailed in the first-session guide: promise, goal, plan, price, trial. Show the plan before the price, and make the trial a continuation of a plan already started.

Ayo Omolewa's least intuitive advice is to start from a flow someone else has already tested. Libraries such as Mobbin or ScreensDesign make converting screens easy to study, so the first mover pays for the experiments and you start from what won.

A borrowed paywall without the product behind it converts once, then produces refunds and bad ratings. A free trial cannot rescue a vague promise.

Net economics before levers

How much of the gross do you actually keep?

Charles Liu breaks down an app collecting 100,000 dollars a month: refunds, platform fees and marketing can leave around 10,000. Before optimizing a paywall, calculate your net per paying user and the acquisition cost that goes with it.

Type What you sell Key signal Main lever Risk
Game Time and attention Ad value per player Difficulty, ad inventory, shortcut pricing Compulsion, involuntary spending
Dating Status and visibility Desirability score Contextual upsell, personalized price Misrepresenting what is sold
Subscription An outcome Onboarding completion Promise, plan, trial, anchoring Refunds, early churn

What to copy, what to leave

Which mechanics travel without the abuse?

Copy:

  • Measure value per segment before setting a price.
  • Make onboarding demonstrate the outcome.
  • Test one variable at a time and log the result.
  • Reuse a structure that won; rebuild the content around your product.

Leave:

  • Manufacturing a loss to sell the win.
  • Showing a number that means nothing.
  • Selling a ranking without saying what it measures.

The checklist before touching the paywall

  • Write in one sentence what the user buys, and what they get in the first seven days.
  • Calculate net per payer: refunds, fees, support, marketing.
  • Instrument the five onboarding steps and the trial completion rate.
  • Pick one lever to test this month: price, trial length or promise.
  • Check that every screen remains true if the user understands the mechanism.

Sources

Stanislas Molveau

Founder, Molveau Studio

I design and build web and mobile products, and write these guides from teardowns of real apps rather than theory.

LinkedInSee my work

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