Anthony Radke: Product Sense Pushups: Subscription Decisions — Paywall and Upgrade Flows

Each freemium model reflects what the company optimizes for. Spotify lets you listen free with ads because ad-supported usage and Premium are roughly comparable on value per user; the main advantage of upgrading is predictable revenue, not radically different profits, so Spotify keeps most features open and applies just enough friction (ads, skips, offline limits) to nudge you toward Premium. The New York Times is the opposite: ad revenue per reader is relatively weak and many visitors come for a single high-value article, so a metered paywall and registration gates convert intent into subscriptions. They want to show you enough to hook you, then require payment to finish the story or keep reading more. Figma, meanwhile, monetizes through enterprise expansion: it gives individual creators a generous free tier to seed adoption, then paywalls the team layer (shared libraries, permissions, handoff, admin/security) because that’s where willingness to pay lives.