Case study · publicly documented
Adriene Mishler built one of the largest yoga audiences on the internet by charging nothing for any of it. The paid product came later, and she publishes it herself.
Yoga With Adriene has grown past 12 million YouTube subscribers on a simple premise: every class is free, forever, no upsell at the end. That generosity is the whole brand. It also means the revenue on that library is set by ad rates she does not control, on a platform that owns the relationship with every one of those viewers.
Find What Feels Good is a membership app listed on the App Store under Yoga With Adriene, LLC. Not a platform, not a white-label vendor. Her own company is the publisher of record. It has been live since October 2015 and was still shipping updates in June 2026, which makes it one of the longest-running creator-owned apps in wellness.
The pitch it makes is unusually honest about what you are buying. In its own App Store description it offers over 900 videos, including the entire Yoga With Adriene library without ads or the distractions of YouTube, plus close to 300 videos that exist only inside the app. You are not paying for content you cannot get. You are paying for the version of it she controls.
The membership sells at $12.99 a month or $129.99 a year, both listed publicly as in-app purchases. It holds a 4.87 average across more than 3,100 App Store ratings, and it has been compounding for over ten years while the free channel keeps feeding it.
Before
After
The instinct most creators have is that giving everything away kills the paid product. This is the clearest public counterexample. The free library is not competing with the membership, it is the top of the funnel for it, and it works precisely because nothing is held back.
What she sells is not information. It is the environment: no ads, no algorithm, no recommended video pulling someone out of their practice halfway through. That is a product decision, and it is the one thing YouTube can never sell her audience, because removing the distraction is the opposite of that platform's business model.
The part worth copying is the ownership, not the yoga. She controls the pricing, the relationship and the roadmap because her own company publishes the app. That is the layer a creator app studio builds and operates, so a creator can go on being generous in public while the business quietly compounds underneath.
Sources: App Store listing for Find What Feels Good Yoga (publisher, release date, in-app purchase pricing, ratings, product description). Subscriber scale is widely reported. No revenue figures are claimed here because none are public.
The model, without the legwork
We build the app around your method and operate it with you, so there’s no six-figure upfront build bill and no software team to manage. You focus on your audience.