MGS 2026 Recap: Subscription Paywalls, Pricing, and Japan
You added a subscription plan, so why do users close the app the moment the paywall appears? If you have redesigned that screen several times and conversion still won't move, the problem may not be the screen at all.
A paywall is the screen that asks people to subscribe before they can use paid features. This post recaps "Winning Global Subscribers: A Growth Playbook," a session the daglo marketing team attended at Modern Growth Stack (MGS) Week 2026, held July 21 to 24, 2026 at the Westin Seoul Parnas. Jaewoong Eom of RevenueCat and Miyoung Park of JEJEMIMI, the team behind the parenting app Suksuk Chalkak, shared what they learned about subscription conversion, pricing, and expanding into Japan.
We transcribed the session with daglo on site, then reread the transcript back at the office to pull out the key points.
How Suksuk Chalkak settled on subscriptions
Suksuk Chalkak is a parenting app that organizes baby photos by date and shares them with family. It changed its business model three times, from paid app to free and unlimited to subscription, before subscriptions finally stuck.
- Longest-running No. 1 parenting app on the Korean Google Play Store, with 1.2 million sign-ups worldwide
- Revenue growing about 2.6x per year on average, with roughly 600 million photos and videos uploaded
- Each mom who signs up invites 6 to 7 family members on average
Because it is a photo storage service, server costs climb with every new user, and commerce revenue alone couldn't keep up. The first pitch was simply "subscribe to upload longer videos," and subscriptions grew only linearly. Once the team added ads while people viewed photos and videos, and offered a subscription alongside them, subscribers grew quickly. The founder also wrote to customers several times to explain why the company chose subscriptions, which helped the change land without the backlash the team had feared.
Paywall strategy: timing beats design
For this subscription app, what moved conversion most was not the paywall's design but when and how it appeared. Adding explanation steps before and after sign-up roughly doubled the conversion rate.
- Value onboarding: Before sign-up, show what gets better with a subscription and by how much.
- Sign-up: The team accepted a slightly longer flow.
- Paywall bridge: Tell people a paywall is coming and what it means.
- Paywall: Only then show the payment screen.
Personalizing the paywall to user behavior also paid off. As the speaker put it, efficiency peaks "when the paywall matches the activation metric."
| User type | Paywall message |
|---|---|
| Uploads lots of photos | Bulk photo storage |
| Family member who sees many ads | Remove ads |
| Makes photo goods | Discounts and free shipping on goods |
| Invites many relatives | One subscription covers the whole family |
Raising prices actually increased sales
The team first matched competitors' prices, then recalculated real costs and moved to a family plan of 9,900 won a month or 99,000 won a year, higher than competitors. To justify it, they kept adding features no competitor offered, so a direct price comparison no longer made sense.
The most surprising experiment involved a 2,900 won ad-removal option. Margins were thin, so the team had only sold it quietly to people who never subscribed. After raising the price, they started promoting it on the onboarding paywall next to the family plan, and subscriber numbers rose fast. Higher prices made the team sell more actively, and that change in attitude showed up in revenue and subscriber counts.
Japan: trust and AI wariness were the real variables
In Japan, the app (Sukusuku Pasha) grew daily active users 11x and monthly active users 5 to 6x over the past year, and Japan now brings in about 10% of revenue. Pricing and paywalls were the same as in Korea. What differed was trust and attitudes toward AI.
| Area | Korea | Japan |
|---|---|---|
| Home screen message | How widely it's used and how much it stores | How safely it stores your photos |
| AI features | Presented as features | Not labeled as AI, with clearer consent and an option to turn off auto-upload |
| Price sensitivity | Relatively low | High, with strong response to rewards and events |
| Family invites | 6 to 7 per user | 2 to 3 per user |
Japanese users vet apps carefully. "Is it safe?" shows up as a related search for the app's name. Parenting decisions lean heavily on influencers, so team members sent direct messages to nano and micro influencers and built supporter and ambassador programs to earn trust and feedback.
Key takeaways for subscription app growth teams
The session boils down to three ideas: paywalls are about timing, pricing is about value that can't be compared, and going global starts with trust. The team keeps AI out of memory-keeping and uses it actively for information like feeding and sleep guidance.
- Are your paywall tests focused on timing and pre-paywall onboarding before visual design?
- Can you show different offers depending on what each user does?
- Is any product priced so low that your team doesn't bother to sell it?
- When entering a new market, do you lead with safety and trust before features?
- Have you mapped where users welcome AI and where they'd rather not see it?
Quoting the book Pricing, the speaker noted that some customers who love a product want "the right to pay," and urged teams thinking about global expansion to start as early as possible.
With two speakers on stage, knowing who said what matters when you review a transcript. daglo's Speaker ID remembers voices you've named once and fills in real names instead of "Speaker 1" from the next recording on. daglo is the first service in Korea to offer this to every user. Learn more about Speaker ID
For the other sessions we covered, see our full MGS 2026 recap.
#MGS2026 #ModernGrowthStack #SubscriptionApps #Paywall #PricingStrategy #GlobalGrowth #RevenueCat #daglo
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