7 ms·

Launch HN: RevenueCat (YC S18) – Simple API for Managing In-App Subscriptions

103 points by jeiting 8y ago

Hello HN! We’re Jacob and Miguel, founders of RevenueCat (https://www.revenuecat.com https://www.revenuecat.com). We’re taking the pain out of building a business on in-app subscriptions. Before starting RevenueCat, Miguel and I worked together at Elevate (https://www.elevateapp.com https://www.elevateapp.com), 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. 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. 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). 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. 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.

gdilla 8y ago
Why would I use this over, say, Stripe, which is also very developer friendly, robust, and no fear of disappearing anytime soon.
- jeiting 8y ago
  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.
  - kimdotcom 8y ago
    What if Mark acquires you?
    - jeiting 8y ago
      I will only sell to Megaupload. It's my intention to build the company of my life and run the service forever. I hate the idea of a BigCo buying us, shutting down our service, and screwing over all the devs that trusted us. It would have to be a pretty ridiculous amount of money to make me sell out like that (in case you're listening Mark).
      - privacypoller 8y ago
        I believe that you truly hold this attitude now, but your response could literally be the preface for every "our incredible journey" post ever published.
        jeiting 8y ago
        Yeah, that's why this objection is pretty frustrating. No one will really believe me anyway so I don't get too worked up trying to convince people. I think we just need build trust in the community. That takes time and I accept that.
        elwatto 8y ago
        Hi – Miguel here. That is totally valid point. I also think this objection stands true for every dependency of your technical infrastructure. This is the kind of decision you have to make, assessing the risks on a case by case basis. I believe no dependency is 100% safe. It can happen to any given service, from companies like Heroku, MixPanel or Segment to the smallest open source library you rely on. Obviously I think the benefits of outsourcing your in-app subscriptions to us is well worth it, based on our experience and the engineering time you will be saving, but I might be biased :)
cmuguythrow 8y ago
Typo :^) Why should I trust RevenueCat? "Because... They brings that experience to RevenueCat."
- jeiting 8y ago
  Oh! On our web page. Good catch!
adanhn 8y ago
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?
- jeiting 8y ago
  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.
  - adanhn 8y ago
    > 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.
    - jeiting 8y ago
      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.
ridruejo 8y ago
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
baldajan 8y ago
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.
- jeiting 8y ago
  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.
cridenour 8y ago
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.
- jeiting 8y ago
  Stripe is coming! This was a big source of pain for us at Elevate, supporting 3 platforms seamlessly.
  - jaxondu 8y ago
    Any plan for a Flutter SDK?
    - jeiting 8y ago
      Right now I'm handling the iOS, Android, React Native, and Unity and its a full time thing. I'd like to add more SDKs as soon as we can. The nice thing is that we can leverage our iOS and Android SDKs and things like Flutter are usually a pretty light wrapper. It takes me more time to understand the workflow for building and deploying than the actual implementation.
  - LewisJEllis 8y ago
    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?
    - jeiting 8y ago
      Stripe might be sooner since it's mostly just backend work and we have some existing customers asking for it.
orasis 8y ago
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.
- jeiting 8y ago
  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.
orliesaurus 8y ago
There's a minor typo in the footer: "Revenue Model Cal>C<ulator"
- jeiting 8y ago
  Thanks!
ductionist 8y ago
This looks amazing and is definitely much-needed. Any plans to add an SDK for the Microsoft Store?
- jeiting 8y ago
  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.
austenallred 8y ago
Why has this not existed before?
- jeiting 8y ago
  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-mobile-subscriptions-payments/ https://www.zuora.com/2015/07/08/dont-give-apple-money-mobil... 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
  - austenallred 8y ago
    Thanks, we'd love to have you! Finish up demo day and fundraise first :)
bonquit 8y ago
When will the Xamarin SDK be ready? Need to decide whether to implement on our own or wait for RevenueCat
- jeiting 8y ago
  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
  - bonquit 8y ago
    I guess we'll just make do until the Xamarin SDK is ready. Thanks.
    - jeiting 8y ago
      Yeah, sorry. You aren't the first to ask and I suspect not the last. We're gonna do it.
yodon 8y ago
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.
- jeiting 8y ago
  Soooooon. :)

103 points by jeiting 8y ago

gdilla 8y ago

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

jeiting 8y ago
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.
- kimdotcom 8y ago
  What if Mark acquires you?
  - jeiting 8y ago
    I will only sell to Megaupload. It's my intention to build the company of my life and run the service forever. I hate the idea of a BigCo buying us, shutting down our service, and screwing over all the devs that trusted us. It would have to be a pretty ridiculous amount of money to make me sell out like that (in case you're listening Mark).
    - privacypoller 8y ago
      I believe that you truly hold this attitude now, but your response could literally be the preface for every "our incredible journey" post ever published.
      - jeiting 8y ago
        Yeah, that's why this objection is pretty frustrating. No one will really believe me anyway so I don't get too worked up trying to convince people. I think we just need build trust in the community. That takes time and I accept that.
      - elwatto 8y ago
        Hi – Miguel here. That is totally valid point. I also think this objection stands true for every dependency of your technical infrastructure. This is the kind of decision you have to make, assessing the risks on a case by case basis. I believe no dependency is 100% safe. It can happen to any given service, from companies like Heroku, MixPanel or Segment to the smallest open source library you rely on. Obviously I think the benefits of outsourcing your in-app subscriptions to us is well worth it, based on our experience and the engineering time you will be saving, but I might be biased :)

cmuguythrow 8y ago

Typo :^) Why should I trust RevenueCat? "Because... They brings that experience to RevenueCat."

jeiting 8y ago
Oh! On our web page. Good catch!

adanhn 8y ago

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?

jeiting 8y ago
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.
- adanhn 8y ago
  > 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.
  - jeiting 8y ago
    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.

ridruejo 8y ago

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

baldajan 8y ago

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.

jeiting 8y ago
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.

cridenour 8y ago

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.

jeiting 8y ago
Stripe is coming! This was a big source of pain for us at Elevate, supporting 3 platforms seamlessly.
- jaxondu 8y ago
  Any plan for a Flutter SDK?
  - jeiting 8y ago
    Right now I'm handling the iOS, Android, React Native, and Unity and its a full time thing. I'd like to add more SDKs as soon as we can. The nice thing is that we can leverage our iOS and Android SDKs and things like Flutter are usually a pretty light wrapper. It takes me more time to understand the workflow for building and deploying than the actual implementation.
- LewisJEllis 8y ago
  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?
  - jeiting 8y ago
    Stripe might be sooner since it's mostly just backend work and we have some existing customers asking for it.

orasis 8y ago

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.

jeiting 8y ago
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.

orliesaurus 8y ago

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

jeiting 8y ago
Thanks!

ductionist 8y ago

This looks amazing and is definitely much-needed. Any plans to add an SDK for the Microsoft Store?

jeiting 8y ago
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.

austenallred 8y ago

Why has this not existed before?

jeiting 8y ago
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-mobile-subscriptions-payments/ https://www.zuora.com/2015/07/08/dont-give-apple-money-mobil... 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
- austenallred 8y ago
  Thanks, we'd love to have you! Finish up demo day and fundraise first :)

bonquit 8y ago

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

jeiting 8y ago
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
- bonquit 8y ago
  I guess we'll just make do until the Xamarin SDK is ready. Thanks.
  - jeiting 8y ago
    Yeah, sorry. You aren't the first to ask and I suspect not the last. We're gonna do it.

yodon 8y ago

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.

jeiting 8y ago
Soooooon. :)