Field notes
The paid screen is a poor place to start a path review
Most teams who book a Conversion Path Audit already have a strong opinion about the paywall. They have rewritten the headline. They have shortened the plan picker. They have watched a handful of checkouts complete and concluded the path is “the paywall plus whatever is immediately before it.”
In recordings, the paid screen is often the least surprising part of the sequence. People who reach it have already survived a permission prompt, a restored state, or a crash that dumped them into an empty cart. Starting the review at the paywall treats those survivors as the whole population.
When we reconstruct a path in Manchester, we ask for the screen list from first open, not from the plan picker. The first stall we can evidence is usually earlier: a restore that resets a trial clock, a notification prompt before anyone has a reason to allow it, or a back-stack that returns to a welcome screen the person has already dismissed.
That does not mean the paywall copy is sacred. It means a paywall rewrite will not repair a restore. A path review that only annotates the paid step is a copy review wearing analytics clothing.