Conceived, designed, and directed every part of the product over 18 months — onboarding flow, paywall strategy, and feature set — engaging contract developers and a designer to build it out. Live on the App Store with real paying subscribers and early signal that specific price points convert and retain well. Raising a first round to scale acquisition on what's already working.
The clearest data point: comparing plans on the same billing cycle, the $8.99/week paywall converts fewer users but returns roughly 4.4× more proceeds per paying user than the $2.99/week paywall — a 3x price gap producing a much larger value gap. That's a structural signal, not just a price test.
The $2.99/week paywall is the current volume leader — 62 conversions and $780 in proceeds, the highest of any variant tested — showing the funnel converts at scale when priced low.
Before NetiFend: over a decade in direct-response marketing, building and scaling paid-acquisition funnels to seven-figure revenue across multiple consumer verticals. NetiFend is the same playbook — offer, funnel, paywall, iterate — applied to a category with real, growing demand.
Designed the product direction end-to-end — onboarding flow, paywall system, core protection features — and directed contract developers and a designer to build it. No cofounder, no outside capital, no committee.
Ran creative and advertorial tests to learn what converts, iterating on paywall pricing, structure, and messaging along the way.
Shipped on the App Store with community spam protection, AI-powered scam detection, Safari ad blocking, and legal-recovery matching — real users, real reviews, real renewals.
The next dollar in goes toward proving the strongest paywalls at real volume, not new feature building.
The U.S. identity-theft and scam-protection services market — the closest direct analog to NetiFend, the category LifeLock and Aura compete in — was valued at $3.32B in 2023 and is projected to reach $7.60B by 2030 (12.5% CAGR). Most of that spend still runs through legacy, desktop-first providers. A mobile-first, AI-powered entrant has real room to take share.
TAM reflects the consumer identity-theft/scam-protection services category, not the much larger enterprise fraud-detection software market, which sells to banks and payment processors, not consumers — a different buyer we don't compete for. Primary acquisition today runs through Google Display Network for its scale; Meta, TikTok, and Apple Search Ads are the natural next channels once GDN's CAC is fully proven out.
Full performance across every paywall variant live-tested to date. Sorted by proceeds per paid user. Top two rows are the current focus for scaled acquisition.
| Paywall | Users | Conv. | Proceeds | Per Paid User | Cancel Rate | Renewals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $8.99 / week | 90 | 8 | $509.49 | $101.90 | 81 | |
| $5.99 / week | 103 | 16 | $567.17 | $63.02 | 134 | |
| $99.99 / year | 214 | 24 | $574.85 | $63.87 | 10 | |
| $2.99 / week | 231 | 62 | $780.34 | $22.95 | 371 | |
| $69.99 / year | 83 | 13 | $286.14 | $47.69 | 17 | |
| $49.99 / year (T) | 33 | 3 | $69.98 | $34.99 | 2 | |
| $49.99 / year | 231 | 36 | $454.87 | $30.32 | 15 | |
| $1.99 / week | 129 | 27 | $496.07 | $29.18 | 353 | |
| $39.99 / year | 109 | 22 | $279.90 | $23.33 | 12 | |
| $29.99 / year | 78 | 19 | $193.74 | $17.61 | 17 | |
| $4.99 / week | 19 | 1 | $31.41 | $31.41 | 9 |
All figures reflect a 3-day free trial ahead of billing, in-app dashboard data. Includes every tested variant, including underperformers.
Built bottom-up from tested funnel economics — not a share of the market, a function of dollars in. Based on a $40 target CAC and the $101.90 realized LTV per paid user from the $8.99/week paywall, our strongest-performing cohort to date.
| Monthly Ad Spend | Est. New Paying Users / mo | Est. Revenue Added |
|---|---|---|
| $10,000 | ~250 | ~$25,475 |
| $25,000 | ~625 | ~$63,688 |
| $50,000 | ~1,250 | ~$127,375 |
At a $40 target CAC against $101.90 LTV, current LTV:CAC sits near 2.5×. A healthy benchmark is typically 3–4×+ — closing that gap, not just adding spend, is part of what this raise is meant to prove out. The $40 CAC is a target estimate, not yet a measured blended figure from live ad spend.
Illustrative only, not a projection or promise: using a conservative 3× revenue multiple — roughly in line with typical early-stage, private subscription-business multiples — each acquired user represents an illustrative ~$305 of potential future value (3 × $101.90 LTV). Actual exit multiples vary widely (2.5×–10×+) based on scale, growth, and retention at the time of any transaction, and nothing here is a guarantee or projection of investor returns.
Push real, sustained spend behind the $2.99/wk and $5.99/wk paywalls — the two with both strong LTV and enough volume to trust.
Grow the highest-LTV paywall past its current 8-user sample to see if $101.90/user holds at scale.
Measure blended cost-per-paying-user against LTV across channels, and report back with hard payback-period numbers.
Happy to walk through the full numbers on a call, or answer anything this page doesn't cover.
Contact Chris, Founder →