There are two ways to make more money on mobile, and app teams spend nearly all their time on one of them.
The first is to sell more of what the business already sells: move the paywall, sharpen the pricing, tighten the funnel. The industry calls this optimisation, it’s a real craft and it works. The second is to change what the business sells or how it earns, because a phone in the customer’s pocket can be the starting point for a business model that wasn’t possible before. That second one rarely reaches an app team’s roadmap, and it is where the larger numbers tend to sit.
This article is about the second kind. A mobile phone can change the economics of a business: it turns occasional contact between a company and a customer into daily attention, a single offer into a route to several others, and expensive customer service into self-service. Any one of those shifts could be worth more than a year of paywall tests.
I have seen this firsthand: helping turn a consumer education product into a proposition for schools worldwide, introducing financial products at relevant moments in a customer journey, and moving costly routine interactions onto mobile for a payments business. In each case, the strategic question was bigger than “How can we improve conversion?” It was: “What can this business do now that it has a direct place in the customer’s pocket?”
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To be fair to the paywall, it works. My team ran an advanced A/B/C paywall optimisation workstream on Mondly, a language learning app with more than 140+ million downloads, moving where in the journey the paywall appeared, rebuilding the layout, and validating price points by market and platform. The revenue improvements were significant. On mobile the smallest details carry real weight, and I have written before about how removing a single word lifted onboarding conversion by 10 percentage points.
What that work cannot do is change the shape of the business. Paywall optimisation improves the rate at which you convert the customers you already have, a better tap on the same pipe. It also leaves you exposed to the dynamics you know are coming, because acquisition costs rise and competitors multiply, so a conversion rate you tuned last year will likely become less efficient over time.
The bigger question is the one nobody in the app team feels qualified to ask. What business does this app now make possible that was not possible before? There are four answers that keep showing up, and each one pulls a different lever: the cost of serving a customer, the frequency of contact, the moment of intent, and the buyer itself.
Move your operations into the app, and sell inside the journey
There is something faintly absurd about Europe’s most aggressively low-cost airline running one of the smartest mobile strategies in aviation, but Ryanair understood early what a phone in every passenger’s hand does to an airline’s economics. When it moved to fully digital boarding passes in 2025, most people read it as a cost cut. It was also a distribution decision, because overnight the app stopped being a convenience and became a condition of flying, handing Ryanair a direct line to every passenger on every journey.
Every digital boarding pass removes a printed document, a queue and a short conversation with a staff member, none of which amounts to much on its own. But multiplied across hundreds of millions of journeys it changes the cost to serve customers, which is not merely a product metric, but reshapes the economics of the business.
Making the app compulsory does something else as well: it builds a storefront. An airline that controls the whole journey can time its offers rather than simply list them. Seat upgrades and insurance are the obvious ones. The more interesting one: A few weeks ago, twenty-five minutes before takeoff, I got a notification offering to have a coffee delivered to my seat – not an offer waiting in a shop I’d have to visit, but one landing at the exact moment I was thinking about it (and interestingly, suddenly competing directly with every coffee shop in the departure lounge).
Ancillary revenue is a very large business for Ryanair in its own right, €4.72 billion of €13.95 billion in the 2025 financial year. Not all of that belongs to the app, but what the app adds is the window a website closes the moment you pay: the weeks and minutes between booking and departure, when the passenger is still deciding what they’ll need and can be reached with an offer timed to that moment. That window didn’t exist before the app became compulsory.
Finally, higher frequency app use also encourages more direct travel booking through that same app, avoiding commissions to a third-party booking platform, and with that keeping pricing control and customer data in-house. It is a multiplier effect.
Most teams keep the core experience and the monetisation apart, treating the second as something bolted onto the first. Ryanair merged them, because it didn’t just ask the question what features its app should have, but what can mobile change about how this business runs. I have written up the full mechanics with screenshots if you want to see how the pieces fit together.
Turn daily attention into shelf space for new products
When the team I worked in built some of the first popular banking apps in the UK for NatWest and RBS, we watched an interesting change in customer behaviour. Online banking was a weekly chore, where you sat at a desktop, checked your balance, paid a bill and left. Within a short time of the app’s release, we saw that the same customers were opening it twice a day or more, often for no transactional reason at all – just checking, with a glance before buying something and another after payday.
What the app delivered was a volume of daily attention no branch network could have provided. A bank with several thousand branches might see a customer a handful of times a year, and now it was several hundred, with that customer already authenticated and already thinking about their finances.
That is not just an engagement metric. It is shelf space, and shelf space changes what you can sell. Revolut has built an entire company on this, reporting $6 billion of revenue in 2025 across eleven separate product lines, including $936 million from subscriptions alone. Revolut did not build a bank and then add an app. The app, built to be used daily, was core from the start, and they kept filling it with more useful services.
If people open your app every day and all you sell them is one subscription, you have the best shelf in the shop and one product sitting on it.
Own the moment of intent rather than the category
The move also runs in the opposite direction, when a company already holds the attention and wants to extend intent into a transaction. In May 2026 TikTok formalised in-app travel booking with Booking.com, Expedia, Trip.com, Viator, GetYourGuide and Tiqets, so a user who sees a place in a video can book a stay or an experience without leaving the app, across a US base of around 200 million users.
TikTok is not becoming a travel agency. It is closing the gap between seeing something and booking it. On a phone that gap is a few seconds wide, and it is where many people give up. The booking platforms get demand at the moment of inspiration rather than at the moment of comparison shopping.
TikTok did not expand into a neighbouring category, it expanded into a neighbouring moment. Ask what your users do in the first minutes after they close your app, and you will usually find someone else collecting the money for it.
Sell your consumer capability to a business buyer
Headspace started life as a consumer meditation app, funded the way those apps are funded, by individuals paying a monthly subscription. Today it also sells an employee mental health platform to employers and health plans, with coaching, therapy and psychiatry sitting alongside the meditation content, and says more than 4,000 organisations now use it, including Mattel, Ericsson and Sony Music.
The interesting part is what the business buyer is actually paying for. Employers are not short of mental health vendors. What they are short of is take-up, because most workplace wellbeing benefits sit unused behind an intranet link nobody clicks. Headspace had spent years learning how to get someone to open an app voluntarily on a Tuesday night, with no HR email telling them to. That is hard to build, and it is exactly what an employer buying for ten thousand people needs, because a benefit nobody opens is worth nothing. Headspace could buy the clinical side, and did, through its merger with Ginger in 2021. The daily habit was the part it had already spent years building.
I have done a version of this myself, turning a consumer education app into something that would benefit schools worldwide. It is worth checking whether the same can be true for your business. What a consumer pays a few pounds a month for, a business will sometimes pay more per user under longer-term contracts, with less arguing over price and far fewer people cancelling. Most consumer teams never explore this, because every day is spent on the consumer funnel.
Why good teams keep missing this
Partly because the paywall is safe. It is measurable, it belongs to the app team, and nobody needs to convince a finance director to run a test on it. The business model question crosses departments and does not always have a clear owner. Moreover, teams are measured on app metrics, so naturally teams optimise for… indeed, app metrics.
Mostly, though, it is a habit of thinking. Many of us were trained to treat mobile as a channel, and channels are things you push an existing offer through. Mobile is not a channel. It is a set of conditions, closeness, frequency, context and immediacy, that make certain business models work which would work nowhere else.
That is the mobile mindset, and it is the thread running through every example here. Ryanair, Revolut and TikTok are not smarter than their competitors about pricing pages. They start with a different question. Ask “how do we sell more of this” and you get a list of tests to run. Ask “what can we do now that we are in someone’s pocket” and you get a list of businesses you could be in. That is the strategic mobile thinking I spent a book trying to pin down in Pocket Winners.
What to do tomorrow
Look for the work your app could take off the business.Somewhere in your company people are doing something by hand that a phone could do instead: answering the same question all day on a support line, chasing paperwork, booking appointments, printing and posting things nobody reads. Each of those is a cost your app could remove.
Map the ten minutes after someone closes your app.Write down what your user does next in the real world. Somewhere in that list is a transaction another company is taking. Ryanair sells the coffee. TikTok sells the hotel room.
Price your frequency.If a customer opens your app three hundred times a year, that is shelf space. List every product you could credibly place in front of them at the right moment, then put a number on it.
Audit your capabilities separately from your audience.Write down what your app can technically do, then ask who else would pay for exactly that. A consumer engine with a B2B buyer attached usually needs no complete new technology and can re-use its core capabilities.
Keep tuning the paywall alongside all of it.It pays, it pays quickly, and I would never tell a team to stop. Just do not mistake a better conversion rate for a better business.
A personal note
After I led the build of the mobile platform at Ebury, a B2B payments business, two team members told me I should write a book. Not about payments, but about how we had worked as a team. They said they had learned more on that project than anywhere else, and thought other teams should know too.
It had never crossed my mind as I was too close to the daily action. From the inside it was just how we did things, and it took someone else to point out there was something there worth sharing. So I wrote it, and that became Pocket Winners.
That is usually how opportunities show up. Not in a meeting, but in the moment you step out of the daily grind long enough to look at things with a bit of a different perspective. Taking the step is the frightening part, because you trade something that works and can be optimised easily for something unproven. Which is exactly the trade in this article. The paywall is the thing that works and that you can measure by Friday, and the business model question is uncomfortable precisely because nobody can promise you the number in advance.
Every business in this article expanded beyond what it already sold, because it took the uncomfortable step anyway. Keep optimizing the paywall, but reserve part of the roadmap for the harder question: not how mobile can sell more of today’s business, but what new business becomes possible because the customer carries it in their pocket.
