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Calm down! or Insight Timer’s freemium model lead to 25M users
What we can learn from their product strategy
Insight Timer has around 25 million installs and 3 million monthly active users.
The app generated $1.1M in revenue in January, sitting at position number 6 in the category below Calm, and Headspace and having almost the same revenue as 3 other mental health apps.
Meditation apps are in fierce competition. With so many options, what keeps users using one app over another? A big part of it comes down to user experience.
Insight Timer enjoys a 4.9 rating with almost 500K reviewers on the App Store.
Looking at the reviews, it is the best meditation app in the world.
How did they do it?
I used the app for a long time and it felt like the best user experience for practicing mindfulness. Registration is a breeze, no long compulsory onboarding, easy access to thousands of free resources along with a minimalist interface and lightweight gamification — what else would you wish for?
Let’s dive deeper into the product design of the app.
Psychological safety
When you compare Insight Timer to other big names like Calm and Headspace, you start noticing some major differences. Both Calm and Headspace are known for having a lot of their content behind paywalls, with free trials that lead up to subscription. This means that users often have to decide pretty quickly if they want to pay up to access the full app.
Their tactics include things like gated content, where only a small portion of meditations are available for free and the rest are locked unless you subscribe. Another common strategy is countdown offers, where users see a time-limited discount that pressures them to sign up quickly before the deal expires. Then there are free trials that automatically…
