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From a purely practical standpoint, it's easier to charge for the app and let Apple do the billing and payment processing, than to set up a system to handle rec
by zippergz 11y ago
From a purely practical standpoint, it's easier to charge for the app and let Apple do the billing and payment processing, than to set up a system to handle recurring billing (and then you need to deal with cancelations, chargebacks, etc.). I've gone through this thought process for a few side projects, and unless I anticipate really large MRR, it's hard to convince myself to go through the hassle of setting up subscriptions.
- wehadfun 11y agoNever used them but https://www.chargify.com/ https://www.chargify.com/ is supposed to be a service for this. Of course then you run into the disappearing service problem again.
- adamfeber 11y agoI work for Chargify and wanted to comment on the "disappearing service problem." Chargify has been around for over 7 years and has been growing and profitable for the last 4 years. If disappearing services is a concern, we do not plan on going anywhere for a long time :)
- JimDabell 11y agoApple handle recurring billing for iOS applications too.
- manarth 11y agoApple supports in-app purchase of subscriptions, so you can still use the standard App-store tools to handle recurring billing.
- zippergz 11y agoOh, right. My bad. Somehow I totally forgot about that!
- lentil 11y agoI think they're restricted to certain types of apps, though? The app review guidelines[0] say: > "Apps may only use auto-renewing subscriptions for periodicals (newspapers, magazines), business Apps (enterprise, productivity, professional creative, cloud storage), and media Apps (video, audio, voice), or the App will be rejected" I assumed that's why so many iOS apps use non-recurring billing instead. You can still sell access to your service, but users have to manually purchase at each subscription interval. [0] - https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#purchasing-currencies https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#pur...
- intrasight 11y agoThis app did sound to me like an enterprise business app. So I agree with other commenters here that the author didn't pivot soon enough to business users.
- levemi 11y ago> than to set up a system to handle recurring billing (and then you need to deal with cancelations, chargebacks, etc.). You just plugin the Stripe SDK and set up a Stripe account and it's done. It's not hard. It takes like half a day. You don't have to do any of this manually. If you're a tiny team and you are doing this manually you're doing it wrong. I've never had to worry about chargebacks or cancelations being a problem.
- seibelj 11y agoYou cannot use the strip SDK for iOS devices. IAP only. And by that I mean, any situation where you want to purchase something in-app (an upgrade, premium service, etc.) and not a transaction for a real-world good. Real world goods can be purchased using whatever, but digital goods must use IAP.