My wife showed me her phone a few weeks ago. Every other ad was a vertical drama app.

I did what I always do: checked their revenue. The top app is doing $22M a month. Not a year. A month. That number sent me down a rabbit hole that ended with me on stage at Shipaton talking about monetization, and with a completely different pricing model in the app I’m building. Here’s what I found, and how to set it up yourself.

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The submission deadline is 23rd October.

The $1.75B mistake

In 2020, Quibi raised $1.75 billion to build a short-series app. The founder was a Hollywood veteran, former chairman of Walt Disney Studios. They had the content, the money, the talent.

For monetization, they looked at Netflix. Hard paywall, $7.99 a month.

First month: 2.6 million installs. Six months later: shut down.

At the same time, on the other side of the world, the microdrama boom took off in China. Those companies didn’t look at Netflix. They looked at games.

Each episode is designed like a level of Candy Crush. Cliffhanger at the end, and you want to “play” to get to the next one. And once someone is hooked, they don’t just want to consume more. They want to spend more.

What the winners actually do

I checked five of the top apps. They all run the same model. That’s not a coincidence.

Every user, at every stage, has something to consume:

1. Free episodes to get hooked
2. Rewarded ads to unlock more without paying
3. Coins to unlock episodes on demand
4. Subscriptions for unlimited access

This is the whole monetization spectrum, not one paywall. The user who will never pay still generates ad revenue. The user who hates subscriptions buys coins. The heavy user subscribes.

The State of Subscription Apps report backs this up. Most categories are 63.5% subscription-only. Gaming is the outlier at 40.5%, with the heaviest use of consumables at 27.5%. Games figured this out decades ago. Apps are just late.

How I set it up

I implemented all three in the app I’m building for Shipaton. Everything runs through RevenueCat. Let me walk you through it.

Subscriptions. You know this one. Create the products in App Store Connect and Play Console, import them into RevenueCat, build a paywall, show it in the app.

Coins. This is where it gets interesting. You’re building an in-app economy, which means two sides: users need to earn coins, and they need to spend them.

Spending is easy: unlock the next episode, refill lives, whatever fits your app.

Earning starts with IAP. That closes the loop. But don’t stop there. Coins are an engagement lever, not just a revenue stream. DramaBox gives coins for daily check-ins, for connecting an account, for enabling notifications. Every action you want the user to take can pay out in coins. RevenueCat now supports virtual currencies natively, so balances and grants are handled server-side.

Rewarded ads. This is the cherry on top. Ads alone won’t make you real money unless you have millions of users. But rewarded ads do two things: they let non-payers earn coins without degrading the experience, and they push people toward the subscription (“or just skip the ads forever”).

Setup: AdMob account, create the app, create a rewarded ad unit, show it with the AdMob SDK. Connect AdMob to RevenueCat and the ad revenue shows up next to your subscriptions. For rewarded ads, the coin grant happens server-to-server, so users can’t fake a watch.

Who this is for

Not every app needs three revenue streams. But if you’re building in one of these categories, the hybrid model is worth a serious look:

• Games (obviously)
• AI apps, where usage has a real cost per action
• Education (Duolingo runs this playbook)
• Entertainment and content
• Health and fitness

Here’s the thing. If your app has any consumable unit, whether that’s episodes, generations, lessons or workouts, you’re leaving money on the table with a subscription-only paywall.

The full talk goes deeper on the RevenueCat setup. It’s live on YouTube now.

Are you running anything besides subscriptions in your app? Hit reply and tell me what’s working. I’m collecting real numbers for a follow-up.

Vadim

PS. The Amazon Developer Global Hackathon deadline is October 23rd. Eight weeks sounds like a lot until it isn’t. Sign up now.​