Designing recurring revenue into a product built to resist it.

PPV revenue held throughout. We shipped subscription without touching the coin economy. That constraint shaped the model, the touchpoints, and the decision to keep Premium beside coins instead of above them.

Repeat behaviour mattered most: a third of Indian subscribers re-subscribed at least once, and repeat subscribers drive nearly half of India subscription revenue.

I placed Premium inside moments where listeners already made decisions: onboarding, paywalls, store, coin spend, daily unlocks, renewal, and cancellation. I then folded those patterns into Aural, Pocket FM's design system.

The early screens read like feature lists. I stripped them back to one benefit, kept "Free" as the anchor across trial and paid states, and used show artwork at hero scale so the offer felt tied to a story the listener already cared about.

The screens above make the solution look direct. The hard part was the model underneath. Listeners bought coin packs and spent them to unlock episodes, and that PPV economy generated most of the revenue.

Users kept asking for subscription: more access, less friction, a value story they could understand mid-listening. The business needed recurring revenue. I had to design one Premium model that served both while keeping the listener promise and the revenue model separate. The constraint was firm: PPV revenue had to hold. A generous plan would collapse the coin economy. A restrictive plan would stall conversion.

Tier 2/3 India users expected a subscription to unlock the catalogue. Our plan did something narrower: 60 minutes of daily free episodes per show plus ad-free listening. After that, paid and free users still met the same coin wall. I had to make extra access feel worth paying for without making coins feel obsolete.

There was no prior subscription product. I was starting from zero.

After V1 shipped, user researcher Rachit Jain ran qualitative interviews with R2+ renewal cancellations. I joined the plan and the calls, then reframed V2 around the real churn trigger: users saw an unexpected bank debit and felt consent had broken. One line kept coming back: "Bina puchhe paisa kaat liya." Money taken without consent.

Before locking the model, we tested the major shapes a subscription could take: full app access, 120-min and 90-min daily unlocks, catalogue models with a fixed set of free shows, extra coin bundles. Each strained a different side of the economy. I centred the strategy on trust: users had to see why a constrained model was worth paying for even when it could not promise unlimited access.

I used two filters for each construct: does the user understand what they are getting, and does the business survive if they do? The 60-min daily unlock passed both.