I removed the paywall from my iOS app’s first 7 days
I launched ALTE a few weeks ago, an all-in-one health tracker I built because I was tired of having meals, workouts, sleep, water, weight and everything else scattered across different apps.
Since launch, I’ve been doing the usual solo-developer thing: shipping updates, watching what happens, getting feedback, and questioning approximately every decision I’ve ever made.
One piece of feedback stuck with me: people should be able to actually experience the app before being asked to subscribe.
Originally, ALTE offered a 14-day App Store subscription trial, but that still meant hitting a subscription screen before you really knew whether the app was useful to you.
So I changed it.
ALTE now opens directly into the full app with 7 days completely free. No account, no payment details and no subscription required. You can log meals, workouts, sleep, supplements, measurements and everything else normally.
After the seven days, nothing gets locked away. All of your existing data, trends and history remain available to browse and export. A subscription is only required if you want to keep adding new data.
That change went live this week as part of a much bigger update.
I also completely rebuilt Insights. Instead of simply showing averages, ALTE now looks across what you’ve logged for useful patterns: whether metrics are trending up or down, where you’re consistently missing your own targets, and relationships between things like sleep, training and other tracked data.
There’s also a new supplements tracker with adherence and streaks, quicker logging from Today, better food and barcode handling, individual supplement reminders, improvements to Apple Watch and iCloud syncing, and a pile of smaller fixes.
The funny part is that the 7-day preview came directly from another indie developer who tried ALTE and gave me feedback. I initially wasn’t planning to build it, but the more I thought about his criticism, the more I realized he was right.
That has probably been my favourite part of launching something publicly. Not every piece of feedback is useful, and you definitely don’t have to implement everything people suggest, but occasionally someone points at something you’ve been looking at for months and makes you see it completely differently.
So, three-ish weeks after launch, ALTE already isn’t quite the app I originally shipped.
And I think that’s a good thing.
Still a solo build. Still SwiftUI, SwiftData, HealthKit and CloudKit. Still shipping. 🙂
I’d be curious to hear from other indie developers: what’s the biggest change you’ve made to a product because of early user feedback?
