Tanuj Chatterjee is the CEO of Super Unlimited VPN — the #1 VPN app in the world by downloads, with over a billion installs and more than a million new downloads every day, almost entirely organic. In a conversation with David Barnard and RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting, he breaks down the product-driven growth loop that got them there, the deliberate decision to leave money on the table, and what five years of A/B testing has taught him about the gap between what looks good and what actually converts.

The screenshot redesign that kept losing

Super Unlimited’s App Store screenshots are, by Tanuj’s own admission, a little stale. The team has spent years trying to fix that. They’ve tested modern layouts, updated colors, new content arrangements, and contemporary design trends. The results have been consistent: 80% of the time, the new version loses.

“People just like to see what they were used to seeing,” Tanuj says. “In many cases, we have gone back to the original ones that we had.”

The finding cuts against one of the most common instincts in app growth: that better design means better conversion. For an app sitting at the top of App Store search, the risk of a major visual overhaul is asymmetric. Disrupting a proven asset is more dangerous than the upside of a marginal lift. The team still tests — methodically, one variable at a time — but they’ve learned to treat the data as the authority, not their aesthetic judgment.

Why a low conversion rate is part of the strategy

Super Unlimited’s free-to-paid conversion rate is, by most subscription app standards, quite low. Tanuj is fine with it.

“Our free version is that good,” he says. “You don’t want to throttle or take things away from the free version. There’s a reason we have the word unlimited in our name.”

Free users can access dozens of countries and cities, watch a couple of ads, and use the VPN without restrictions. The paywall exists — premium subscribers get no ads, top-tier servers, multi-platform access, and priority support — but it’s designed to be easy to dismiss. There’s a large X in the corner. No dark patterns.

The logic is a numbers game. Super Unlimited’s LTV is modest compared to a Spotify or a Netflix. But their top of funnel is enormous, and it’s almost entirely organic. The free experience generates the ratings volume and return-visit signals that feed the App Store algorithm, which keeps the downloads coming. “Our top of the funnel is our superpower,” Tanuj says. “Don’t mess with it.”

The countries where they lose money on purpose

Super Unlimited serves users in countries where the economics don’t work. Turkey, Myanmar, and other markets with low CPMs, high infrastructure costs, or active internet censorship are not profitable. The team knows this and serves them anyway.

When Turkey banned Instagram for 11 days last year, Super Unlimited received 15 million downloads in four days — roughly 30-40% of Turkey’s internet population. The revenue from those users didn’t cover the cost of serving them.

“We just think it’s the right thing to do,” Tanuj says. “People should have access to information. They should not be constrained by just propaganda.”

This isn’t purely altruistic. The geopolitical spikes that come with being a global VPN have a compounding effect: each spike drives the app to a new normal at a higher baseline once the event passes. But the decision to serve loss-making markets is a deliberate one, made on values grounds, not just financial ones.

What happened when support moved into the product team

At most companies, customer support is a separate organization. It presents KPIs to the product team once a month. The feedback loop between user pain and product fix takes weeks.

At Super Unlimited, the head of support reports directly to the head of product.

“I have been at companies where product and support was a totally separate organization,” Tanuj says. “The pace at which the feedback loop goes into the product side is a lot less.”

When a spike in support tickets from Uganda signals a service quality issue, the product team knows the same day — not next month. A recurring question about a feature becomes a UX fix in the next sprint, not a FAQ entry. For an app where service quality is the primary competitive advantage, the speed of that loop is the speed of improvement.

The episode also covers how Super Unlimited thinks about paid search when you’re already the #1 organic result, why they’re betting on Windows as their next growth vector, and the infrastructure decision — bare metal servers for the data plane, cloud for surge capacity — that makes their unit economics work at scale.