Project summary
- One of the publisher accounts within the Only group was shut down by the App Store, taking with it a major share of revenue and creating an immediate 7-figure cash gap. This forced the team to look for a more controllable cash-flow model.
- Only moved to web2app funnels and card-based payments, which helped them shorten the payback window and improve margins.
- With FunnelFox, the team skipped manual development almost entirely. A designer builds web funnels in about an hour, so new ideas go live the same day.
- Web2app with FunnelFox became a core part of Only’s new operating model: controllable, scalable, resilient, and fast.
Challenge
Only is a mobile publisher operating across utility-focused verticals — Photo & Video Editors, AI Content Generators, AI Assistants, Screen Art, and other categories where demand moves quickly and competition is unforgiving.
The crisis hit when one of their key App Store publisher accounts was suddenly shut down. That account drove a substantial share of traffic and revenue, and its loss created a major cash gap overnight.
Only needed an alternative monetization channel that could restore cash flow, speed up payback, and stabilize the business. They decided to rebuild the monetization flow around the web: launch web2app funnels and move subscription payments to cards.
But this was never a simple technical switch — it meant a fundamental shift in the operating model, with different risks, an expanded set of key metrics, and a different tempo.
Why you can’t just “pause traffic” on the web
Web payments rely on a continuous flow of “clean” transactions. If chargebacks and disputes spike, your acquirer or PSP (Payment Service Provider) can throttle you or shut the merchant account down entirely.
In mobile, it’s simple: a campaign dips, you pause traffic, fix marketing/product setup, and relaunch.
On the web, you don’t have that option when you work at scale: when new first transactions stop coming in, the proportion of fraud-prone ones rises automatically, and fraud metrics turn “red” even if the product itself is performing perfectly.
Therefore, it was essential to keep a stable, predictable flow of traffic.
The speed mandate
A core dynamic of Only’s product verticals is speed. What converts today will fade tomorrow, and every change in user intent requires a matching creative and a matching funnel.
Hand-coding funnels would have taken several days — something that simply wasn’t viable in the middle of a cash crunch and a fast-moving market.
The team needed to build and launch funnels within hours, validate ideas immediately, and operate without depending on frontend development.
This is exactly where FunnelFox came in.
Solution
Only didn’t even consider hand-coding funnels. From day one, they chose to build everything in FunnelFox because anything else would have been too slow and too risky in their situation.
When a new market opportunity appears, the team produces an ad creative and builds a dedicated funnel immediately. For example, in the AI Video Generation product vertical, delivery speed is absolutely crucial: new LLM models pop up weekly, so the products that launch dedicated ads first enjoy the best CTRs, leading to higher ROAS.
In a week, CTRs will stop dropping due to competitors flooding the feeds with the same ad concept. So by the time a developer recreates a funnel on the frontend, the opportunity is already gone. Although the UA strategy may not rely heavily on what we call “trends”, having an opportunity to achieve double or triple CTRs while spending tens of thousands per day on Facebook makes fast funnel delivery worth it.
The internal process is repeatable and efficient: a designer receives the monetization model, the vertical, and the creative concept, and assembles a full funnel within an hour.
At peak velocity, the team launched dozens of these funnels every week. The volume is lower today, but speed and flexibility remain the core of how Only operates.
Only’s funnel skeleton: Short, direct, no quizzes
Utility apps convert differently from fitness or education products (i.e, content apps). Users arrive with one intent: to do the exact thing they just saw in the ad — edit a photo, replace a background, generate a clip, apply an effect.
Vladimir puts it simply:
That’s why Only’s funnels are:
- short — minimal steps, everything direct;
- no quizzes — they generally don’t fit utility scenarios and only slow the user down;
- tightly matched to the creative — the funnel must show the exact value promised in the ad;
- structured as short onboarding: show value → move to payment.
Impact
In the majority of Only’s product verticals, timing defines success. You need to ship new setups quickly (ad network → creative → funnel → monetization scheme → app), validate hypotheses early, and scale. Every delay costs money.
Switching to web payments tightened the payback cycle and improved margins. And it isn’t about lower commissions — in the Only’s case, the overall cost of running a web-payment infrastructure is actually comparable to the App Store. The upside comes from a very different place:
1. Control over the payment infrastructure
On the web, the team has full flexibility over how payments are structured — the flow, the providers, the routing and cascading logics, and the speed of configuration updates.
This gives a level of control that simply isn’t possible inside the App Store ecosystem.
2. Faster and more predictable payouts
The cash-return cycle is shorter, which matters enormously when you’re recovering from a large cash gap. Faster payback creates immediate room to scale.
3. A more resilient business model
Web payments let the team build monetization around their own processes rather than Apple’s rules. It moderately reduces dependency on external factors and gives the team direct control over risk points, including fraud, chargebacks, and the overall stability of the transaction flow.
The role of FunnelFox in this system
FunnelFox became an operational pillar for Only. With its visual builder and flexible configuration, the designer can launch a new funnel in under an hour with zero developer involvement.
This allowed the team to:
- test hypotheses at high velocity,
- react to trends within the same day;
- scale even in highly competitive, fast-moving verticals.
Final thoughts
Web2app works best when you treat it as a system, not a set of pages. It’s about owning the infrastructure, understanding your risks, and making decisions at the pace the market demands.
This is exactly how Only operates.
The team isn’t just “building funnels” — they’re running a monetization system, where speed, clarity, and operational control translate directly into resilience and long-term growth.
Their story shows how a critical situation can trigger a complete transformation of operational, monetization, and cash-flow models. Losing a major share of App Store revenue forced the team to move to the web, which raised the operational bar. In this environment, FunnelFox became a delivery backbone: funnels built in an hour, ideas tested the same day, and a steady, predictable flow that kept the business stable while everything else was in motion.
