In the digital economy, subscription-based mobile apps have emerged as a dominant business model. While both acquiring and retaining customers are crucial to be successful in the long run, many companies struggle with costly customer acquisition and high churn rates. Therefore, companies need to leverage their understanding of underlying drivers that influence mobile app users’ decisions to sign up and remain subscribed. Although existing literature has explored these drivers in both technology and subscription fields, research addressing the interrelated duality of the two notions remains scarce. Based on a literature review, this study introduces a conceptual framework examining drivers of user acquisition and retention on this notion. This framework identifies performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, price value, hedonic motivation, habit, trust, and facilitating conditions as predictors for sign-up intention(acquisition). In contrast, hedonic motivation, habit, trust, and facilitating conditions are key predictors for continuance intention (retention). To test the frameworks’ applicability in the context of Spotify, a quantitative online survey was conducted with 330participants. Overall, the empirical findings found performance expectancy, effort expectancy, price value, and habit to be significant predictors for sign-up intention, while effort expectancy was the only one to exhibit a negative effect. For the continuance intention, only habit was confirmed to be a significant predictor for continuance intention in the context of Spotify. These insights are crucial for guiding companies to make informed strategic decisions to acquire and retain customers effectively.