subscription-lifecycle

The subscription-lifecycle skill is a strategic playbook for optimizing a mobile app's subscription business end to end — from trial start through conversion, renewal, cancellation recovery, and win-back. It addresses the problem that subscription revenue leaks at every stage, and gives product and growth teams a stage-by-stage map with benchmark metrics, recommended interventions, and messaging templates for each transition point in the subscriber journey.

The skill breaks the lifecycle into four stages. Stage one covers trial optimization, with recommended trial lengths by app type, a day-by-day trial nurture message sequence, and conversion-moment paywall design. Stage two tackles voluntary churn, mapping cancellation reasons to fixes and prescribing a cancellation flow (pause offer, value recap, last-resort discount, exit survey) plus engagement signals that flag at-risk users. Stage three addresses involuntary churn from failed payments through a dunning schedule, grace-period configuration for iOS and Android, and RevenueCat integration for automated billing retry and webhook-triggered messaging. Stage four defines win-back campaigns with an escalating offer ladder, channel options, and Apple StoreKit 2 native win-back offers for iOS 18+. It supplies benchmark formulas for trial-to-paid, renewal, churn, MRR, LTV, dunning recovery, and resubscribe rate, and a subscription health report output format.

The target users are subscription app product managers, growth marketers, and monetization leads. It complements sibling skills for paywall and pricing strategy and for analytics dashboards. It is pure advisory content — benchmarks, tables, and message copy — with no executable code beyond documenting third-party platform features, so it carries no operational risk.