How Life360 Increased Subscription Rate by 36% and Drove $25M Annual Revenue with Experimentation
About Life360
Life360 is a leading family safety app with over 50 million active users, providing location sharing, driving safety features, and emergency assistance. They have been partnered with Aryng for multiple data projects to enhance its data-driven decision-making and business growth.
Nicholas Goffeney
Director - Product & Marketing Analytics, Life360
"I couldn't have asked for a better partner than Aryng. They added bandwidth, velocity, and analytical excellence to my team at Life360, helping us achieve specific business outcomes. Aryng's ability to provide additional resources and thought leadership, and track record of delivering positive business impact make them invaluable consulting partners.
Their expertise helped us design campaign experiments and rework data to allow for more intricate analysis, leading to specific business outcomes. Life360 now has dashboards, KPI definitions, and analytics that it has never had before in its established history.
Their consultants are strong performers who can operate independently and work directly with important cross-functional partners, which was extremely helpful for me.
I highly recommend Aryng for their strong consultants who are consistently available during US hours and their promising thought leadership consulting for leaders seeking reliable and effective consulting services for data engineering and beyond.”
BACKGROUND
Life360, a family safety app, was facing a common SaaS revenue challenge: converting free users into premium subscribers. With significant value available in their free features, users had little incentive to upgrade, resulting in plateaued subscription growth.
To improve subscription optimization, Aryng identified an opportunity to monetize free users by experimenting with limiting free access to location history - a feature highly valued by users.
- Hypothesis: Free users had access to 48 hours of location history, which provided significant value without requiring a subscription. To incentivize users to upgrade, Life360 needed to experiment with reducing this access.
- Goal: The goal was to measure how these changes could improve the free-to-premium conversion rate while ensuring user retention metrics remained stable.
EXPERIMENT
Aryng designed a strategic A/B experiment to test the impact of limiting free access to location history on subscription upgrades. By segmenting users into control and test groups, Aryng ensured statistically significant results while minimizing disruption.
- Sample size: To ensure statistical significance, the team calculated a required sample size of 1.5 million users across all groups.
- Control and test groups: The control group included free users with 48-hour location history (no change). The test groups included two variants - the first with 24-hour location history and the second with 6-hour location history
- Phases: The experiment rolled out in a phased manner. In phase 1, the experiment targeted new users on iOS in the US market. In phase 2, it was expanded to existing users. In phase 3, it was further expanded to include both iOS and Android users in the US market
- Timeframe: The expected timeframe for the experiment was 45 days with insights reported weekly.
PROCESS
Aryng used the modified version of BADIR approach called BEDIR to plan, execute, and validate the experiment. From setting business goals to monitoring guardrail metrics, the team ensured a seamless process using tools like AWS Athena and Amplitude for data collection and real-time tracking.
- Business Goal Identification: Defined the experiment’s primary goal as increasing subscription rates, with secondary goals as improving trial rates, user retention, and engagement with location history. Established guardrail metrics to ensure retention rates remained stable during the experiment.
- Experiment Plan Creation: Created control and test variants using Figma, with the control group retaining 48 hours of location history and two test groups having reduced access of 24 hours and 6 hours of location history, respectively.
- Data Collection: Used SQL and AWS Athena to query and collect data and created weekly reports on subscription rate lift, statistical significance, and control-vs-test comparisons. Monitored subscription rate changes and retention metrics weekly using Amplitude dashboards. Conducted rigorous sanity checks, ensuring a single source of truth (SSOT) for each metric.
- Insights: Observed a staggering 55% increase in subscription rate in the 6-hour test group within the first week into the experiment. This increase normalized to a stable 36% in the following weeks.
- Recommendation: Recommended reducing free users’ location history access from 48 hours to 6 hours. This change is projected to drive over $25 million in annual revenue.
RESULTS
Aryng implemented a phased rollout of the history paywall experiment, leveraging the best practices for SaaS experiments to refine and scale the initiative.
- Increased Conversion Rate: The 6-hour history limitation led to a 36% increase in subscription rates compared to the control group.
- Scaling Success: The experiment was eventually expanded to all existing US users on both iOS and Android platforms, ensuring consistent impact across the user base.
IMPACT
The history paywall experiment delivered high-impact results almost immediately. The 36% increase attributed to the 6-hour variant resulted in over $25 million in projected annual revenue impact.
This impact was so significant, that Aryng’s team thoroughly examined 11 additional metrics to ensure the accuracy of these results and rule out any confounding factors. The team extended the experiment duration to 30-35 days to confirm the stability of the results, paving the way for implementing the changes across all users and driving millions in revenue.
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