What Share Of Companies Run A Soft Paywall Variant?
Of 252 companies with paywall CTA data tracked by Lazyweb Research, 145 (57.5%) show a visible exit on at least one captured paywall — even though only 26.2% of individual screens are soft [1][2]. Most companies run at least one soft variant while defaulting most screens to hard gates [1]. The screen-level and company-level rates diverge because soft exits cluster in a subset of each app's paywalls [1].
57.5% of companies (145 of 252) ship at least one soft paywall, versus only 26.2% of individual screens — Lazyweb Research, July 2026.
Screens are hard, companies are mixed
At the screen level, 710 of 2,708 paywalls (26.2%) are soft [2]. At the company level, 145 of 252 companies (57.5%) run at least one soft paywall somewhere [1]. The gap tells you soft exits are not evenly spread — a company will hard-gate most placements and soften a few (for example, an onboarding paywall versus a mid-session upsell).
How to apply it
The company-level number is the honest competitive benchmark: a majority of tracked apps have decided that at least one surface deserves a visible exit [1]. If your app hard-gates everywhere, you are in the minority of companies (about 42%), even though hard is the majority of screens [1][2]. Use surface, not app, as the unit of decision — pick which placements get an exit rather than choosing one policy app-wide.
Caveats
Both rates are lower bounds: undetected close controls and unlabeled CTAs would raise them [1]. Company coverage varies — some apps have many captured screens and some just a few, so 'has at least one soft variant' is easier to satisfy for heavily captured apps [1]. This is what-shipped evidence, not lift [1].
The numbers
| Stat | Computed from |
|---|---|
| 145 of 252 companies (57.5%) have a visible exit somewhere | companies_with_any_visible_exit: 145/252 = 57.5% |
| 710 of 2,708 screens (26.2%) are soft | screens_with_any_visible_exit: 710/2,708 = 26.2% |
Sources & citations
- [1] Lazyweb Research analysis of 252 companies with paywall CTA data (mobile app corpus), July 2026. Company counts as soft if any captured paywall shows a visible exit; a lower bound. ↩
- [2] Lazyweb Research analysis of 2,708 paywall screens (mobile app corpus, 252 companies), July 2026. Screen-level visible-exit rate. ↩
Source: Lazyweb Research — proprietary analysis of real, in-market app screens. Cite as Lazyweb Research, 2026-07-07.