Six subscription paywall examples, and what each one blocks
Real paywall patterns from live checkout sites: what each one asks at the pricing exit, and how the answers rank once blocked revenue is attached.
A paywall pattern is only as good as the number it produces. These are the sites MorePaying is installed on right now, grouped by the paywall shape they use, with the question each one asks when a user walks away.
None of the examples below uses a survey panel or a prototype. Every one of them is a live checkout, and the reason counts on this site come from the answers those users actually gave.
Credit-based generation sites
The paywall appears when a user runs out of credits or wants to keep a rendered result. The moment is concrete, which makes the exit question easy to answer honestly: the user already saw what they were buying.
The failure mode is that the question arrives after the user has emotionally moved on. Ask at the exit, and treat "the free plan was enough" and "the first result was not good enough" as completely different problems — one is pricing, the other is product.
- LongCat Video, Lyria 3, Hunyuan Motion, AI Upscale and HappyHorse Video all run a credit paywall with a single question on the pricing exit.
- Plain Upscaler runs the same pattern on an upscaling flow, where the paid unit is a higher-resolution export.
What the paywall asks
The question is deliberately narrower than a survey: what is the main reason you are not upgrading today, with a fixed list of answers and one free-text option at the end. Fixed answers are what make the results rankable — without them you get a folder of sentences and no ordering.
- The answer is captured with the plan, the channel the user arrived from, and the amount they were about to spend.
- The same card runs on the paid pricing page and on the in-product upgrade path, so the two stay comparable.
Ranking the paywall by blocked revenue
Once the reason is attached to an amount, the paywall stops being a list of preferences and becomes a work queue. The top blocker gets a fix, the fix ships against a release SHA, and the paid conversion for that release is compared with the locked baseline on the report page.
That loop is what turns a paywall example into a decision rather than a design debate.
FAQ
How many answers does a paywall need before the ranking means anything?
Enough that the top answer is not one person having a bad day. Below that, read the answers as quotes rather than as a distribution.
Should the paywall question be the same on every site?
Keep the answer list identical so the results compare across products. Change the moment the question appears, not the options.
Does asking at the pricing exit cost conversions?
It is one question on an exit path where the user has already decided not to pay. The risk is asking for a paragraph, not for a single fixed choice.