Launching Zilch Plus

Zilch has established strong product-market fit as a flexible payment provider, with significantly higher engagement than other competitors in the BNPL space. However, income was mostly received through affiliate and fee revenue, earned from customers making purchases.

Revenue was often impacted by seasonality and customer spending behaviour, with peaks and troughs noticeable on a monthly, weekly and even daily basis. If customers stopped making purchases or their spending behaviour changed, then Zilch’s main drivers of revenue would be at risk.

Levers for growth

In early 2025, Zilch was looking for its next growth lever. Exploring ways to deepen customer relationships, diversify revenue beyond affiliates and fees, and increase long‑term retention in ways that were no longer tied directly to customer spending behaviour.

A subscription model emerged as one of the company’s biggest strategic bets for the year. The ambition was not simply to add a paid tier, but to create a membership customers would choose because it amplified what they already loved about Zilch.

This meant design had to help Zilch introduce recurring revenue without undermining the trust, flexibility, and sense of financial control that customers associated with the brand.

Competitive market

From a business perspective, this meant launching a paid product into a market that was already saturated with subscriptions, where customers are increasingly sceptical of recurring fees and focused on receiving value. Cost‑of‑living pressures were front of mind, particularly for Zilch’s core audience, and any perception of poor value or coercion would quickly erode trust.

To validate Zilch Plus I wanted to answer a single question: What makes Zilch worth coming back to, and worth paying for? This insight would give me a good idea of how to frame and position Zilch Plus, as well as enable conversations with the wider business on how to price membership tiers.

I began discovery with interviews across a wide spectrum of Zilch customers, to understand what made Zilch valuable today, and what would make a subscription worth paying for.

Responses quickly pointed the team toward rewards as the strongest value lever. Zilch already offered rewards on debit purchases, but Plus gave an opportunity to significantly enhance this benefit. By expanding where rewards could be earned, how much could be earned, and where they could be spent, Plus would transform rewards from a nice-to-have into a reason to choose Zilch more often.

Customers wanted more rewards in more places, rather than abstract perks. This reframed Zilch Plus from a generic subscription into a rewards‑led membership.

Problems & constraints

Across my research, one theme was consistent: customers are wary of subscriptions. Customers associated subscriptions with hidden costs, unused benefits and difficult cancellation experiences. This was especially important for the Zilch customer base, where a large proportion of customers felt financially stretched and expressed discomfort with adding any new recurring commitment unless the value was immediately obvious.

Zilch already offered meaningful value for free, creating a design tension where incremental benefits wouldn’t be paid for, but removing features from the free tier made customers feel forced to upgrade. The challenge was to design a paid experience that was clearly better, while preserving goodwill toward the free product.

Finally, customers had a clear sense of how Zilch worked, and adding a second tier with additional features may cause cognitive overload. If customers couldn’t predict or understand their rewards, trust would erode quickly and engagement would decline.

Feature validation

Once we had a sense of what made Zilch valuable, I followed up with a second quantitative survey and interviews to validate feature priorities, pricing sensitivity, and overall appetite for a subscription.

Again customers prioritised higher rewards over all other features. Rewards on credit purchases and boosted Pay Now rewards ranked highest, and 38% of respondents were willing to pay up to £5 a month.

This validation reinforced the decision to anchor Plus around rewards, and gave the team confidence to deprioritise softer perks that tested well in theory but lacked day-to-day value.

Defining success for Zilch Plus

Based off my rounds of research, discussions with the strategic finance team and input from leadership, the team defined three success criteria for Zilch Plus:

• It must deliver clear, tangible value from day one
• It must feel like an enhancement, not a restriction of the free product
• It must drive incremental revenue, GMV and retention without harming trust

I framed customer trust, price sensitivity, and protecting the free-tier as non-negotiable design constraints, ensuring the team didn’t optimise for short-term revenue at the expense of long-term retention.

The goal was to take an iterative, MVP-first, approach to launching Zilch Plus. This approach had the benefit of being able to quickly validate the proposition in the market without requiring significant investment in new technology. The downside would be that a thin proposition would not have the positive impact we needed.

In parallel to the discovery research I was carrying out to validate Zilch Plus, I began working through the screens, flows and touchpoints we needed for launch. I generated a rough set of screens to enable early alignment with product and engineering about what the scope of the project would be.

Building out flows in increasingly high levels of fidelity meant we could course correct quickly, based on new insights. Product could organise and unblock teams, while engineers were able to build basic flows and data structures, while final details were still being resolved.

Release planning

To both derisk the launch of Zilch Plus and maximise learnings, we broke our release plan into ~12 cohorts of users. These ranged from high value customers (who we expected high PMF with Zilch Plus), to online or credit only users and lapsed customers.

These cohorts were released on a roughly weekly cadence, with the learnings from each group informing the messaging for the next. Each group was sent CRM messaging, push and in-app notifications, as well as aditional visual treatments in the Zilch app.

We knew that it would take at least a month for each cohort to mature beyond free trials and start converting to paid subscribers. So by the time the final testing group was released and matured we had a clear picture of how user behaviour changed while subscribing.

From the first test cohort onwards, we saw positive signs of behaviour change from members. Zilch plus subscribers demonstrated higher spend, order frequency and rates of retention. With a months free trial on offer, we expected that a sizeable number of subscribers would cancel during their trial, not willing to pay for the feature.

Across all cohorts, we saw ~75% conversion from free to paid, and 85% retention across paid months. Early signals indicate compelling customer value, scalable business impact and appetite for more premium value through memberships.

Customers expressed positive sentiment across social media and in interactions with the customer support team, suggesting that they were receiving tangible vallue from their continued membership.

Maturing subscribers

After the intial waves of free trial adoption settled down and the base of subscribers matured, we saw further changes in user behaviour.

• An additional increase in month on month paid retention
• Number of reactivating lapsed members increased consistently.

This suggested that after the large uptake in users claiming their free trials of Plus, customers saw value in the membership after canceling, and wanted to return to continue enjoying the benefits.

Post-release roadmap

As we opened Zilch Plus up to additional cohorts of users, and transitioned away from an MVP, we would see increased visibility and engagement with minor problems and improvements that we need to address.

After the initial test cohorts rollout of Zilch Plus, focus split into 2 parallel streams of work, one looking at the bigger picture of how Zilch memberships could expand and grow, the other looking at incremental improvements to the core feature.

New features for memberships

New features for Plus, including physical card integration, tastecard partnership, and additional membership tiers like Pro.

Enhancing the Plus experience

To improve and enhance the Plus experience across the app, we looked at any new or incremental improvements we can make to the Zilch Plus experience in order to make the Plus feature better for more customers.