Skip to main content
Status: Decided — August 3, 2026. Supersedes the July 3, 2026 freemium-with-trial model.This is the pricing model of record. All other pricing docs (Tier Comparison, Options Comparison, Revenue Projections, Rollout Plan, Personas & Journey) defer to this page. Where an older draft disagrees with this page, this page wins.

​
The decision

High IQ launches with a hard paywall and a single paid subscription. There is no free trial, no introductory offer, and no meaningful free tier. Key structural decisions:
  • No free trial and no intro offer. The purpose of launch is to learn whether the product is worth full price to a stranger. A discount buys conversions and destroys the signal. Reopen condition below.
  • The website is the free tier. thisiswhyimhigh.com already serves 2,525 researched strains publicly and free, indexed by Google. The app does not duplicate it. The product story is: website = the database, app = your data.
  • All AI is Pro. All personal data is Pro. No exceptions beyond the capped guest label scanner.
  • Historical Import is included in Pro with usage caps. No separate SKU.
  • No lifetime products of any kind.
  • Studio ($19.99/mo) stays deferred to v4.0.

​
Why a hard paywall

  1. AI costs put a floor under the price. Notebooks are LLM-heavy with a research pipeline behind them. At the budgeted ≤$2.50/user/month AI cap, a free tier that touches AI has no path to positive contribution. Keeping every LLM call behind the paywall is what makes Free/Guest economically safe — and once AI is the only thing worth paying for, a free tier that excludes it has little reason to exist.
  2. Storing free-user data forever is a real cost and a real liability. A 30-day retention window for never-subscribed accounts bounds both.
  3. The free browsing job is already done by the website. Duplicating it in the app buys nothing and costs storage, sync, and support.
  4. Full price produces a clean signal. Ten people paying $12.99 cold tells you more than a hundred trial starts.

​
Why guest browse-only still exists

Guest access is not a free tier — nothing is saved and no AI runs. It exists for three operational reasons:
  1. App Review. An app that opens to nothing but a paywall attracts scrutiny under guideline 2.1.
  2. Screenshots must be real. ASO conversion depends on frames of actual product; a locked door does not sell.
  3. The TikTok → install path needs a landing. A cold paywall on first open converts worse than a paywall after one good moment.
Its marginal cost is near zero: no LLM calls, no storage, no sync.

​
Data retention policy

Lapsed ≠ never-subscribed, deliberately. A user who paid for six months and cancels keeps their history for a year. Deleting it would destroy the single best win-back message available (“your 8 months of stash history is still here”) and would reliably produce 1-star reviews. This distinction must be disclosed in the privacy policy and the App Store privacy labels.

​
Unit economics

Never model Apple’s cut at a flat 15% in Year 1. The standard commission is 30% for each subscriber’s first year, dropping to 15% after 12 continuous months. The 15% rate from day one applies only under the App Store Small Business Program (gross under $1M/yr) — enroll immediately. Other constants: RevenueCat ~1% of tracked revenue above the free tier (we are under the 2.5KMTRthresholdforawhile);∗∗AIcost∗∗cappedat∗∗≤2.5K MTR threshold for a while); **AI cost** capped at **≤2.50 per Pro user per month**; refund leak budgeted at 2–5% of gross.

​
Pro Monthly ($12.99)

​
Pro Annual (99.99—99.99 — 8.33/mo effective)

​
Why the price floor is ~$9.99

The AI cost cap is fixed regardless of price, so it consumes a larger share as price falls. Below roughly 9.99,asingleenthusiasticnotebookusererasesthecontributionofseveralordinaryones.∗∗The9.99, a single enthusiastic notebook user erases the contribution of several ordinary ones. **The 4.99 recommendation in docs/business/[plan]-pricing-strategy-projections-nov30.md predates the AI-first product and is superseded by this page.**

​
Annual is the retention strategy

High IQ is a weekly-use product, not a daily one. A monthly bill on a weekly-use app is twelve chances a year to ask “do I still use this?” Annual is one.
  • Annual is pre-selected on the paywall and presented as “$8.33/month, billed annually”; monthly sits underneath as the secondary option.
  • Target annual mix: 50%+, above the 25–35% a daily-use app would target.
  • Monthly and annual must live in the same App Store subscription group so users can move between them without double-paying.

​
The launch funnel (planning assumptions)

These replace all trial-based funnel math in older projection docs.
1–3% net install→paid is the honest expectation, roughly half what a freemium-with-trial model would produce. This is an accepted cost of the no-discount decision, not an oversight. Every subscriber is full-price revenue from day one, and every conversion is real evidence about willingness to pay.

​
Reopen conditions

The no-discount stance is a launch experiment with a defined review date (v1.1, late November — see Execution Plan), not a permanent commitment. Read signals in this order: Only the last row is a pricing problem. The first three look like pricing problems and are not — cutting price in response leaves the same broken funnel with less revenue.

​
Designated first experiments (post-100 subscribers)

  1. Paid intro offer — 2.99firstmonth,then2.99 first month, then 12.99. Preserves the anchor, lowers first-purchase friction, still requires payment on day one.
  2. $9.99 price test via RevenueCat offerings.
  3. Trial reintroduction — only if direct qualitative feedback demands it.
Do not run any of these before 100 paying subscribers; there is no statistical power below that.

​
Rejected alternatives

Note on precedent: the July 3 model listed “Guest + Pro only, no trial” as a rejected alternative whose reopen condition was a post-launch A/B test. That condition was met early by founder decision on August 3, 2026, at 12.99ratherthanthe12.99 rather than the 9.99 originally sketched.

​
Apple compliance requirements

These are blocking, not cosmetic. Missing disclosures are among the most common subscription-app rejection reasons.
  • The paywall itself must show subscription length, price per period, and auto-renewal terms, with functional links to the Terms of Use (EULA) and Privacy Policy.
  • Restore Purchases must be reachable from the paywall, not only settings.
  • Account deletion must be reachable in-app.
  • Monthly and annual must share one subscription group.
  • App Store privacy labels must match the retention policy above.
  • Friends & family and the App Review account receive Pro via RevenueCat promotional entitlements — there is no free tier to grant them.