What Percent of Sign-Up Flows Include a Paywall?
Across 146 sign-up flows tracked by Lazyweb Research, only 9.6% (14 of 146) contain a paywall step [1]. Paywalls rarely interrupt account creation itself; when they do appear, the average relative position is 0.66 [1]. Compared with onboarding flows (31% carry a paywall), sign-up flows are far less likely to monetize in-flow.
Only 14 of 146 sign-up flows (9.6%) contain a paywall step, Lazyweb Research, July 2026 (N=146).
The finding
Of 146 sign-up flows (flow names matching sign up, signup, create account, or register), 14 contain a paywall step — 9.6% [1]. Among those 14, the average paywall relative position is 0.664 [1], later than mid-flow but earlier than the 0.85 seen across onboarding paywalls.
Sign-up vs onboarding paywall rates
| Flow type | Flows | With paywall | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sign-up flows | 146 | 14 | 9.6% |
| Onboarding flows | 129 | 40 | 31% |
An onboarding flow is roughly three times as likely to carry an in-flow paywall as a sign-up flow [1][2]. The account-creation moment is mostly kept free of purchase friction.
How to apply it
Treat sign-up and onboarding as different monetization surfaces. The corpus suggests keeping the registration flow paywall-light and reserving the offer for onboarding, where it is both more common and placed later. If you are considering a paywall inside sign-up, know that fewer than 1 in 10 tracked flows do this [1].
Caveats
The 14-flow paywalling subset is small; the 0.664 average position is directional. Detection is a floor because the paywall flag is sparse [3].
The numbers
| Stat | Computed from |
|---|---|
| 9.6% (14 of 146) sign-up flows with paywall; avg relative position 0.664 | signup_flows_with_paywall |
| 31% (40 of 129) onboarding flows with paywall | onboarding_flows_with_paywall |
| is_paywall NULL on 21,824 of 23,407 screens | universe |
Sources & citations
- [1] Lazyweb Research analysis of 146 sign-up flows (~800 tracked apps), July 2026. Sign-up flows = flow_name matching sign up/signup/create account/register; 14 carry a paywall. ↩
- [2] Lazyweb Research analysis of 129 onboarding flows (~800 tracked apps), July 2026. 40 of 129 onboarding flows carry a paywall, for the comparison. ↩
- [3] Lazyweb Research analysis of 23,407 canonical screens (~800 tracked apps), July 2026. is_paywall is sparse, so all rates are floors. ↩
Source: Lazyweb Research — proprietary analysis of real, in-market app screens. Cite as Lazyweb Research, 2026-07-07.