Where do you put the paywall in an app that helps people quit an addiction?

I'm building Norvayo, an app for quitting nicotine pouches (Zyn, Velo, On, that whole category). Solo, nights and weekends. It's not launched yet, so treat everything below as a decision I've made rather than one I've validated.

The hardest problem so far wasn't technical. It was figuring out what I'm allowed to charge for.

Here's the tension. I want this to make money. I'm not building it as charity, and I don't think there's anything noble about undercharging for something useful. But the product is a tool people use while trying to break an addiction. If someone's on day 9 of quitting and the app says "your streak is behind a paywall," that's not a growth tactic. That's leverage against somebody at their worst.

So I needed a rule that wasn't just "gate whatever converts best."

The rule I landed on: anything that helps you get through the next hour stays free forever. Anything that analyzes, automates, or connects gets paid.

In practice that meant:

Free, permanently: logging pouches and cravings, the coping toolkit (breathing, timers, distraction actions), your streak and badges, money-saved math, a full taper plan that steps your daily limit down to zero, one private accountability partner, and full data export.

Paid: an adaptive scheduler that spreads your daily limit into paced windows timed around your historically hardest hours, pattern analysis across your triggers and timing, longer trend charts, and small group support instead of just one partner.

The line I kept coming back to: the quit plan itself is free. You can taper to zero and never pay me a cent. What you're paying for is the version that thinks about it for you.

The thing I got wrong.

I gave everyone 14 days of full access, then locked the premium features. Seemed obvious.

Then I realized my premium features are at their weakest during exactly those 14 days. The pattern analysis needs accumulated history before it can say anything. The adaptive scheduler needs enough logs to know which hours are hard for you. The longer trend charts need more days than a new user has. I'd built a trial that showcases my paid tier at the precise moment it has the least to offer.

I'm still not sure how to fix that. Options I'm weighing: start the trial after enough data exists rather than at signup, lower the thresholds during trial so insights fire earlier, or reorder the pitch around the one premium feature that works on day one (the group support, which needs no history at all). Probably some combination. If you've solved this in a data-dependent product, I'd genuinely like to hear it.

The other thing I'm unsure about.

One of my gates is "trend charts beyond 7 days." I gated it because it was easy to gate. But nobody has ever subscribed to anything because of a chart, and in a recovery app it risks reading as "we're hiding your own data from you." I suspect that gate costs me more in goodwill than it earns. Haven't removed it yet. Probably should.

Where I actually am.

Zero users. I'm mid-way through Google's 12-testers-for-14-days closed testing requirement, so none of this is validated. I might discover that people happily pay for the charts and don't care about the group feature, and that my whole framework was me reasoning from my own preferences.

What I do believe is that having an explicit rule made the decisions faster and more consistent than doing it feature by feature. When I added something new, I asked whether it helps someone survive the next hour. If yes, it's free. That's answered every case so far without me relitigating it.

Curious how others have drawn this line, particularly in health, fitness, mental health, or recovery. Where does "sustainable business" stop and "exploiting the moment someone needs you" start? I don't think there's a clean answer, but I'd rather hear how other people reasoned about it than pretend I've got it figured out.