Paywall

A paywall is the screen between a user and paid features, explaining what the upgrade includes and what it costs before access continues.

The useful version answers practical questions without making anyone squint: which features are paid, how the plans differ, when a trial starts charging, and how to restore an existing purchase. A paywall is a buying decision, so the terms need to be easier to see than the sales pitch.

A hard paywall offers no path around it. A soft paywall lets you keep using a limited version, read a few more items, or dismiss the offer for now. Neither is automatically a dark pattern. Hiding the close button, preselecting the expensive plan without saying so, or burying the billing period is where the design turns dishonest.

You'll also hear upgrade screen, subscription screen, plan picker, upsell screen, hard paywall, and soft paywall. The screen may look like a pricing table squeezed onto a phone, but the pressure is different because it appears inside the product, often right when someone tries to do something.

The best paywall makes the exchange obvious: this money buys these things for this long. If the user has to decode the offer, the screen is doing persuasion at the expense of trust. Clarity closes more honest sales than camouflage.