How Tourly Reduced Trial Churn by Guiding Users Through Their First Session

Tourly started as an internal tool built by ibarts to solve a recurring client problem: new users signing up for web applications and churning within the first session — not because the product was bad, but because they never found their way to its core value.

The brief was simple: build something that any developer could embed in two minutes, that any product manager could configure without writing code, and that gave real visibility into whether the onboarding was actually working.

What began as a single-feature experiment — a tooltip engine and an embed tag — grew into a full SaaS product with billing, analytics, domain security, multi-page tour support, and a global payment layer. The entire product was built on Laravel 13 and deployed to shared hosting, proving that SaaS-grade infrastructure doesn’t require a cloud platform or a DevOps team.

Tourly launched publicly at tourly.bugsmonkey.com with a 7-day free trial and four paid plans starting at ₹99/month.

The Walk.js core engine is a self-contained JavaScript tooltip library with SVG spotlight overlays, smart viewport positioning (auto-fallback across bottom, top, right, left, and centered modal), keyboard navigation, dot navigation, and a progress bar. It’s generated as a static file per customer script — meaning it loads as a direct asset, not through a PHP framework on every request.

The multi-page tour system uses localStorage as a coordination layer. Each step can declare a target URL. When a user completes the last step on the current page, the system saves the next step index to localStorage and shows a contextual “continue on next page” prompt with a direct link. When the user arrives on the target page, the tour resumes automatically — no server round-trip, no session dependency.

The trace analytics system records six event types per tour: load, start, step view, complete, skip, and exit. All events are sent via navigator.sendBeacon (with fetch fallback) to a single public endpoint. Domain allowlisting means any unauthorized embed is silently recorded and flagged in the admin Alerts panel rather than throwing an error to the end user.

Billing uses IP geolocation to detect the visitor’s country and presents INR pricing with Razorpay checkout for Indian users, and USD pricing with Stripe Checkout for everyone else. Both gateways use server-side signature verification. Every transaction is recorded with an auto-generated invoice number, and all plan changes are tracked in a plan history table — subscribe, upgrade, downgrade, cancel, and admin-assign events are all logged with timestamps.