Lunary launched with a generous free tier. Full birth charts, real-time transits, the complete grimoire, no ads. Pro at £8.49/month unlocks synastry, extended forecasts, and some personalization features.
Three months in: 229 MAU, £22.50 MRR. The freemium model is working in some ways and not working in others. Here's the honest breakdown.
What the free tier includes
The free tier is genuinely full-featured:
- Complete birth chart with all 10 planets, Chiron, North Node, Part of Fortune
- Placidus house system
- Real-time transit tracking with severity tagging
- Full grimoire access (2,000+ articles on astrology, tarot, crystals, spells)
- Daily tarot draws and journaling
- 3 native home screen widgets
- Push notifications for major transits
This was a deliberate choice. The astrology app market is saturated with products that lock basic features behind paywalls. Lunary's free tier has more than most paid apps. The bet is that users who experience the full product are more likely to convert than users who experience a deliberately crippled version.
What's working
Organic discovery. A generous free tier with no friction to sign up means users actually tell people about it. The SEO content (12,300 impressions/day) reaches people searching for specific information; the free tier means they can sign up and use the product without a payment decision in the way.
Retention. Free users who engage with the product genuinely use it. Daily tarot draws create a streak mechanic. Transit notifications bring users back when something significant happens in their chart. The free tier isn't a trial — it's a real product that people use as part of their daily routine.
Positioning. Being the "generous" option in a market of paywalled apps is a real differentiator. Users mention it when recommending Lunary. "It's free and it's actually good" is a sentence people say that a more restrictive free tier wouldn't generate.
What isn't working
Conversion rate. 229 MAU to £22.50 MRR is a conversion rate that's too low. There are people who've used Lunary daily for months on the free tier with no indication they'll convert. A genuinely complete free product reduces the pressure to upgrade.
Feature allocation. Putting synastry behind Pro was the right call — it's a genuinely advanced feature that requires more infrastructure and serves a more committed user. But some of the other Pro features (extended forecasts) aren't distinct enough from the free tier to create a meaningful pull. The gap between free and Pro isn't felt strongly enough.
No usage limits. The free tier has no caps. Unlimited chart calculations, unlimited transit checks, unlimited grimoire lookups. This is good for user experience. It's bad for conversion. A user who never hits a limit never has a moment where upgrading is necessary.
What I'd structure differently
Earlier prompts. Right now, the upgrade prompt appears in the Pro features gate. It doesn't appear during the free experience. A user can use Lunary daily for months and never encounter a reason to think about Pro. I'd add contextual upgrade prompts at high-intent moments: when a user saves their tenth grimoire entry, when they've set up a seventh friend's chart, when a major transit is coming up that Pro gives more detail on.
A soft usage limit on one high-engagement feature. Not paywalling it — just showing a "you've done this 10 times this month, upgrade for unlimited" prompt on something like extended transit forecasts. One friction point in the right place does more for conversion than ten prompts in the wrong places.
Clearer Pro value communication. The Pro page lists features. It doesn't communicate the experience difference clearly. A user who hasn't seen the synastry grid or the extended forecast comparison doesn't know what they're missing. Interactive previews or before/after examples would communicate value better than a feature list.
The number I think about most
229 MAU at £22.50 MRR is a conversion rate under 1%. The industry benchmark for freemium SaaS is 2-5%. The gap is real and it's a product and messaging problem, not a pricing problem.
The product is good. The free tier delivers value. The users who convert stay subscribed. The issue is the path from engaged free user to subscriber isn't well-defined enough. There's no moment in the product that makes upgrading feel necessary.
That's what I'd fix first if I were restructuring the model today.
Would I do freemium again?
Yes, for this specific market. Astrology is a low-trust category: users have been burned by apps that promise accurate readings and deliver Sun-sign horoscopes. A generous free tier is the fastest way to establish that Lunary is actually different.
The conversion problem is a product problem I can solve. The trust problem would be much harder to solve if I'd launched with a paywall.