How do you launch a subscription app?

Generic launch checklists — the 30-step and 127-step kind — treat every app the same. A subscription app is different: success is measured against a 12-month LTV window, not first-week downloads. A launch that looks like a flop in week one can be the profitable one six months later, and a launch that looks great in week one can be burning cash the whole time if trial conversion is weak.

Before anything goes live

• Set ARPU and LTV assumptions from comparable apps in your category.
• Decide the monetisation structure — weekly or annual anchor, free trial or hard paywall — because this decision changes your entire payback math, not just your pricing page.
• Install RevenueCat (or equivalent) and an attribution tool before day one. Retrofitting this after spend has already gone out is expensive. One account we inherited had live Apple Search Ads campaigns running with no attribution stack at all — spend was entirely blind, CPI drifting upward with no visibility into which keywords were actually converting to paid. Connecting revenue events back to keyword-level data and restructuring bids around paying users, not installs, brought CPI down 20% — and it stayed down, because the fix came from data, not a guess.

Channel choice at launch

Apple Search Ads makes sense when there's a genuine keyword gap and high purchase intent — nowhere has higher intent than someone typing into the App Store search bar. Google UAC opens display and video inventory once organic has plateaued, reaching people before they search at all. Meta works well once you have first-party data to build lookalike and interest audiences — but be ready to pull back fast if attribution signal degrades. One weekly-subscription lifestyle app scaled Meta spend past €10k/month and reached positive cumulative ROI by month 20 — then, when iOS 14 attribution changes degraded the conversion signal, the call was to pause rather than chase unattributable scale, and redirect the budget to ASO instead. Knowing when to stop a profitable channel protects margin, and that discipline should be built into how the account is run from day one, not bolted on after signal degrades.

Why the math matters more than it looks: a weekly-subscription app at 13% install-to-paid and a $2.99 price point reaches ROAS 1 after just two charges per paying subscriber — meaning capital recycles in under two weeks. That's not a universal number, but it's the kind of arithmetic that should exist for your app before spend starts, not after.

For a from-scratch launch, this is almost always the foundation month — tracking, attribution, and store presence built out before paid spend starts, so every euro from month two onward is measurable against a real number, not a guess.

If you're pre-launch and want the unit economics mapped before you commit budget, get in touch.