Spotify: premium conversion

Any user who lands on the Spotify app starts with a free plan. What does that mean for them? Limited skips, “interesting” ads,  inability to download music, etc. One way to frame these are disruptors to the users, Someone trying to listen to their ‘lock in’ playlist while doing homework wouldn’t want to be interrupted by an ad about HelloFresh in; offline usage is great for long plane rides. The motivation to convert to premium thus comes from a place to rid these disruptors to habits of listening, and have greater flexibility. Lifetime value is essentially guaranteed as users don’t often downgrade back.

Figma: team expansion

Figma works great for individual purposes, but once you try to expand your team and share wireframes to others, it asks you to pay. This conversion becomes quite easy in almost all cases. Designers have to pass on their work for the product lifecycle and testing to keep on going for improved iterations and power the feedback loop. Without being on a plan —enterprise or otherwise— it becomes a core roadblock for a project or product to keep advancing. It would thus be in the user’s best interest to seek an upgrade, whether that be upgrading to pro access or occupying a seat in the enterprise plan.

NYTimes: subscriber value

On a free model, NYTimes limits the number of articles a user can read per month. The conversion for someone to start paying for a subscription is if they wish to read additional articles. If a user has naturally integrated news consumption into their daily habits and routine, it would make sense for the user to convert to a paid plan to not have to figure out how to allocate their free blocks of article reads.