If you’re monetizing your app through the App Store or Play Store, Apple and Google are quietly taking 15–30% of your income every single month, and you’re also waiting around ~30 days for payouts. In this video I talk about why that’s frustrating as an indie: you don’t fully control pricing (Apple can reject price changes if they think it’s “not worth it”), and it honestly feels like we’re renting our business to the platforms. Then I walk through a strategy that a lot of fast-growing apps use that doesn’t break any rules: web-first onboarding. The idea is simple—move your onboarding quiz + paywall to the web, so users subscribe before they even download the app. You keep more of the money, and the user can still use premium inside the app after subscribing on the web. I demo web2wave (the sponsor) because it’s built exactly for this: web-based onboarding funnels, paywalls, and payments. I show the analytics (revenue, cohorts/LTV, funnel drop-off), A/B testing for quizzes and paywalls, payment providers (Stripe, Paddle, PayPal, etc.), translations (I even try Romanian), and small workflow helpers like AI tweaks for copy and emojis. My main takeaway: the fee savings add up, and the control you get over pricing and testing is just better than relying only on the app stores.