
Launch HN: RevenueCat (YC S18) – Simple API for Managing In-App Subscriptions - jeiting
Hello HN! We’re Jacob and Miguel, founders of RevenueCat (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.revenuecat.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.revenuecat.com</a>). We’re taking the pain out of building a business on in-app subscriptions.<p>Before starting RevenueCat, Miguel and I worked together at Elevate (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elevateapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.elevateapp.com</a>), Apple’s 2014 App of the Year. Elevate is a brain training app that monetizes with in-app subscriptions. We found that while the subscription model was essential to the business being viable, implementing it was time consuming, complicated, and boring. We needed to see and react to customer level data on LTV, churn, and conversion and it just wasn’t possible without building our own, complex subscription tracking infrastructure.<p>RevenueCat is an Android, iOS, React Native, and Unity SDK that allows you to get up and running with subscriptions (with all the bells and whistles) in a couple of hours instead of weeks or months. We’ve found and cataloged the nuances and bugs of the platform in-app purchase APIs and wrapped around them to provide a stable and easy to implement API that is consistent on all platforms.<p>Right now we provide cross-platform status tracking, receipt validation, customer management, and charting for MRR, conversion rate, and more. Our plan is to become a full revenue management platform, so app makers can focus on making their app useful, and we’ll handle making sure it makes money. There are lots of standard monetization strategies (price testing, lifecycle offers, sales, churn prevention, etc.) that most app developers simply don’t have the time to implement and maintain. These things can make a huge difference to revenue (we saw it first hand).<p>We believe mobile software is undervalued and subscriptions can help. Right now, it’s too hard for developers to do them right. We want to fix that.<p>I’d love to hear your thoughts, fears, and desires! We’re working on adding more SDKs (Xamarin, Cordova, etc.) Sound off in the comments if there is one you’d like to see. Also, if you have an app that wants to try subscriptions or monetize them better reach out, we can help.
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ridruejo
Congrats on the launch. I love 'boring infrastructure' companies, they are the
ones that become huge :) The world is moving to subscription businesses and
the tech needs to catch up

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cridenour
Man I wish this existed 8 months ago when I built our own version internally!
We have a mix of Stripe and App Store customers so we'll definitely be
switching (to remove our mental load) if you guys ever support that!

Best of luck.

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jeiting
Stripe is coming! This was a big source of pain for us at Elevate, supporting
3 platforms seamlessly.

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LewisJEllis
Product looks great and would love to use it for iOS+Stripe, so I have to ask
- any timeline for Stripe integration? Also this Fall?

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jeiting
Stripe might be sooner since it's mostly just backend work and we have some
existing customers asking for it.

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baldajan
Pricing isn’t clear for larger scale apps. Is the extra charge per $1k on
include the first 20k; after a tier is reached, how is the next $1k
calculated.

You should have an interactive price meter where we enter MTR and see the
costs per month.

You should also specify if MTR includes or excludes Apple’s cut.

A great inclusion to the service is handling timed hooks to send
notifications. Like if a user is about to have their trial expires and have
their subscription cancelled, sending a notification to remind them of the
trial can be helpful.

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jeiting
Great feedback. Thank you.

The per $1k pricing is only on dollars over the $20k base. We're planning on a
adding price meter a la Segment's pricing page, just a matter of javascript-
ing it up.

I just pushed a change (30s ago) that adds the platform cut question. We base
it pre-platform cut because it incentives us to reduce the platform cut if
possible: by getting more subscribers to the 1 year mark, or by getting
subscribers on to cheaper platforms (like Stripe.)

And yes, lifecycle campaigns are something we want to get into. Since we're
not in the business of push notifications, we'd probably just let you
integrate your OneSignal or Braze key and we could send hooks to them so you
could trigger whatever kind of custom campaign you wanted.

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adanhn
About time. It just saddens me that after so long dealing with the myriad
problems of selling through the AppStore, the response has to come from a
third party instead of Apple. Well, I guess it's developers solving
developers' problems.

Question: How does RevenueCat data integrate with my data pipeline? Seeing all
the metrics and charts in your dashboard is great, but if I already have a
data solution set up, is there a way to export all the revenue data from
RevenueCat into our infrastructure?

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jeiting
We feel your pain. In fact we felt it so bad we decided to fix it. :)

Our dashboard is pretty MVP still. It's good but there is a lot we want to do
yet.

There are a couple ways you can get the data out of our service.

We have webhooks that are like Apple's server-to-server notifications, but not
terrible. We normalize them between Apple and Google and actually provide
events that Apple does not (when a user unsubscribes).

Our Grow plan offers an ETL export where we can deliver you daily (or faster)
CSV's ready to be loaded into Redshift or to be incorporated into your own
ETL.

We also can do event forward and send subscription events as they happen to
third party services like Mixpanel, Google Analytics, or Amplitude. So you can
track renewal events without users opening their phones.

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adanhn
> We have webhooks that are like Apple's server-to-server notifications, but
> not terrible.

That made me chuckle. Sounds like event webhooks + ETL exports should cover
everything. So far Apple's metrics have not only been very limited, but the
fact that we can't relate them to our user data means that they're almost
useless. You can't segment by demographics, correlate to the user's history
(are people who do X more likely to convert?), you can't even a/b test.

Any company that is on the AppStore and takes themselves seriously needs to
know what they're making off each individual user to the penny. If RevenueCat
helps with that, then I expect you'll do very well.

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jeiting
You should come with me when I pitch investors.

Exactly, the ability to tie subscription data to individual users is essential
if you want to run a data driven app business. We make that easy.

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ductionist
This looks amazing and is definitely much-needed.

Any plans to add an SDK for the Microsoft Store?

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jeiting
We want to have an SDK for every platform on Earth...eventually.

Our REST API is pretty simple so it's easy for us to add new platforms. We
just want to make sure we take the time to understand each one well before
supporting them.

Our whole purpose is to reduce complexity so if we create a bad abstraction,
we've failed.

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yodon
Any ETA/plans for a web version?

I'd love to be able to use the same API for web and mobile, with revenue cat
just wrapping a conventional payment processor to provide a compatible API
surface.

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jeiting
Soooooon. :)

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austenallred
Why has this not existed before?

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jeiting
That is a great question.

I think it's largely been overlooked by the incumbents (Zuora, Aria, Recurly)
because of the complexities of the App Store and the relatively small market
compared to credit cards. But the market is growing and more companies are
going multi-channel, selling on multiple platforms.

Zuora has a really smug post about it that motivates me a lot to eat their
lunch. [https://www.zuora.com/2015/07/08/dont-give-apple-money-
mobil...](https://www.zuora.com/2015/07/08/dont-give-apple-money-mobile-
subscriptions-payments/)

I also think it's so early, people are just starting to define the problem and
develop the standard techniques. 3 years ago, Apple was much more restrictive
about what apps could use subscriptions, now it's basically open season. For
non-game apps, this has turned monetization on its head.

So long story short, I'm not sure. Which is why I'm excited to be the first to
build something that I think is obviously needed. We will be able to define
the category which is exciting (and a little scary.)

p.s. i <3 lambda school, i'd love to attend a student defense someday

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austenallred
Thanks, we'd love to have you! Finish up demo day and fundraise first :)

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gdilla
Why would I use this over, say, Stripe, which is also very developer friendly,
robust, and no fear of disappearing anytime soon.

~~~
jeiting
If you are selling digital goods on the app store, you can't use credit cards
(and therefore Stripe).

You are forced to use Apple's in-app purchase APIs which are not very
developer friendly (especially for subscriptions) and aren't very complete
with regards to metrics.

Also, RevenueCat will be around for 1000 years so I reject the notion of us
disappearing. :p Actually, I think about that every day. I had a lot of
friends who got burned when Parse shutdown and I plan to avoid that. The way
our pricing and costs work, we should never have to shut down the service.

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gargarplex
My experience getting burned by Parse was when the platform was up, it was a
flaming pile of shit. Erratic errors, inconsistent downtime, terrible support.
The only good thing was the shutdown, IIRC they offered phenomenal support
thanks to having the resources of Facebook - 1 year notice, open source
software to ease the transition, etc.

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jeiting
This is an excellent, if a little macabre, take on the Parse shutdown.

I think they did as good a job as could be done shutting it down. But, I think
they missed a huge opportunity though. They could have been Firebase. Maybe
making money was an issue but I think they could have figured it out
eventually.

~~~
gargarplex
Thanks for the compliment on my macabre take.

Parse was very very good for making it easy to prototype apps. However, once
apps began to scale, Parse fell apart and was not a suitable technology. They
would not have been able to make money because all the big money comes when
people have full scale deployments on a platform, and that simply would not
have been possible with Parse's shitty-for-scale technology. Again, very
awesome tech for rapid prototyping mobile app development ca. 2012 2013..

It wasn't my decision to bet on the technology; it was in place when I was
called in to put out the fires. I have a hard-won personal rule not to bet my
organization's technical architecture on any tech that hasn't been around for
at least 5 years UNLESS it solves a mission-critical pain point / workflow /
etc.

I was on the engineering team for another mobile app that did $20M a year in
revenue, mostly from in-app subscriptions.. was extremely costly to manage, so
seems like you may have a pain point here and a new tech that may be worth
betting on. Good luck!

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cmuguythrow
Typo :^)

Why should I trust RevenueCat? "Because... They brings that experience to
RevenueCat."

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jeiting
Oh! On our web page. Good catch!

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orasis
Sounds cool. I would deploy it for our iOS app, but our subscriptions are
finally working really well and there is too much risk that we’d break it.
Maybe we’ll try it for our Android version when that gets built in a few
months.

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jeiting
Yeah, that's an understandable objection. We need to work on our value prop
for customers who already have systems deployed. The switching costs aren't
that bad, but there's a question of "why wake a sleeping monster" by messing
with it.

Totally worth trying it out for Android. In a lot of ways, Android is a bigger
pain than iOS on the server side. Feel free to ping me on Intercom or email
jacob@revenuecat.com if you want tips on how to implement it.

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bonquit
When will the Xamarin SDK be ready? Need to decide whether to implement on our
own or wait for RevenueCat

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jeiting
2 weeks! [1] jk

Realistically, this fall. I started to check it out a couple weeks ago but
we're so busy with our existing SDKs I don't think I'll be able to bang it out
super quickly.

Make sure you save your receipts on your server. That will help you either
migrate to RevenueCat some day, or build your own system.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJhHjACjJjA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJhHjACjJjA)

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bonquit
I guess we'll just make do until the Xamarin SDK is ready. Thanks.

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jeiting
Yeah, sorry. You aren't the first to ask and I suspect not the last. We're
gonna do it.

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orliesaurus
There's a minor typo in the footer: "Revenue Model Cal>C<ulator"

~~~
jeiting
Thanks!

