Subscription Over Discounts. Why It's the Harder - but Better - Path

Nina Nicheska (left) and Katarzyna Godlewska founded Nikalab in 2022 with three products and a belief that the supplement market needed transparency. Three years later, the company has 16 products and 80% of sales coming from subscriptions. Source: Photo by Marek Wiśniewski / Puls Biznesu

Most businesses compete on price and promotions. There is another way - and the companies that choose it build businesses that are resilient to market turbulence.

The Polish market has a strange love affair with discounts. Browse any supplement store, online course platform, content subscription, or service business - and in most cases you'll see the same pattern: an inflated base price, set up specifically so it can be slashed by 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent. Repeat indefinitely.

That's not a business model. That's an addiction.

I recently came across the story of Nikalab - a supplement brand that decided to do the exact opposite. No promotions, no markdowns. 80 percent of their sales come from customers who return every month by their own choice. The company is growing at over 100 percent year on year. Reading about them, I thought: this is exactly what we talk about with publishers, schools, and service businesses when we explain what Zevio is for.

The subscription model is harder at the start. It requires more patience, a better product, and a genuine relationship with the customer. You can't buy attention with a one-time promotion and hope they'll stick around. You have to earn the right to have them stay.

But there's something the subscription model gives you in return that a discount never can: predictability. You know what you'll earn next month. You know which customers have been with you for a year and which joined last week. You have the data to make decisions - not guesses.

Subscription Is a Strategy, Not a Feature

Too many businesses in Poland still think of subscriptions as a technical add-on to their shop. Set up a recurring payment, connect a gateway, done. But a subscription is a strategy, not a feature. It's a decision about how you want to build your customer relationship and how you want to earn - steadily and long-term, rather than chasing the next campaign.

There's another dimension that rarely gets talked about. A subscription customer is worth many times more than a one-time buyer - not just financially, but as a source of information. You know what they buy, when, how long they stay, and when they leave. That data lets you build a better product, better communication, and a better offer. Companies that understand this don't compete on price. They compete on relationship.

At Zevio, we see this clearly with every implementation. When a publisher, school, or service business moves from one-time transactions to a subscription model - and does it right, with a considered offer, no artificial promotions, and a convenient payment method - the results speak for themselves. Customers stay. Not because they have to. Because they want to.

A discount buys a transaction. A subscription builds a business.

And that's exactly why we do what we do.

PS. If this topic resonated with you, I'd recommend reading the full article about Nikalab in Puls Biznesu - you'll find it here. It's worth following how Kasia and Nina are building this business. This is one of those cases where a well-made strategic decision at the start pays dividends for years.