jeiting

Hi! We’d love to have you.

For this particular case it’s tricky on iOS since you can’t programmatically cancel a subscription on iOS. It must be initiated by the customer on the device.

However, if you navigate that UX challenge, you can use our events and webhooks to make a smooth experience guiding a user through the process. Hadn’t thought of this before, but you could probably pre-authorize a stripe token, then ask them to cancel on iOS, then wait for the webhook from us, then finish the transaction and track it to the same customer ID in RevenueCat.

Hi! I'm the Chief RevenueCat Shill, aka CEO.

We launched on HN back in 2018 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17610735), were in YC that same year, and have since helped 20k apps power their subscriptions and in-app purchases.

I held back from releasing something like this for years as I didn't quite think we had the capacity to do it well, but we've reached that point now and I think we've released some aggregate stats on subscription consumer mobile apps the prior to this were only available inside Apple or Google.

Yeah, we do. Doing it without a server is a lot of work. We'll automatically revoke entitlement when someone gets a refund from Apple.

I think it is but I'm the CEO so don't trust me.

There are handful of competitors out there; I've heard mixed things and am obviously very biased. They do handle some things better than us, but on balance I think our product is more battle tested and reliable.

We are also getting ready to roll out a very significant update to our underlying abstractions with the release of our developer API sometime in early 2023 that I think will put us far out and ahead.

If you're at the just getting started stage, I have no hesitation saying to go with us, we've got 20k other apps using RC today and another 200 going live every week. We won't charge you anything until your app makes $10k/mo.

Ah! Right, yeah that was me kicking it back to the top of the stack. IMO, these core issues are more important than almost anything else we do, but I think we aren't as good as we should be as making sure we are resourcing them over the new and shiny things.

I've made CEO-noise again and hopefully we can keep pushing on these two.

Hi, RevenueCat CEO here. Thanks for sharing honestly.

I dug into both tickets. A bunch of failures both in product and process on our part. Going to dig in more.

We do use SFBA but the median salary, which isn't super competitive in those locales. Most top tech firms pay 75th %-ile+, so yea it makes SFBA recruiting challenging. This is def a downside because a lot of the scaling experience is still localized in those places, but that will trend down over time. We've had enough success picking up people as they leave the Bay Area.

Thanks for the great feedback. These are all legit issues. We have on our roadmap a revisiting of our API this year and I think we need to have a lower tolerance for abstraction leakage.

Would you mind dropping me an email jacob@revenuecat.com? I think for our long term viability we need to have the trust of people who care about edge cases like this. I’d love to hear more.

Would love to hear how we can improve the API to make you not want Stripe to do it better. :)

Obviously, Stripe is the gold standard and I think we have a hard time, but we're hoping to improve the developer experience even more this year.

I think RevenueCat is the best.

Same could be said for CEO, you aren't really acting in the capacity as would be described by a guidance counselor. However, it is a nice signifier as to who "the boss" is. Same for CTO, it tells people, "this person owns the technical stuff", which at a software company is super important IMO.

RevenueCat | Remote | https://www.revenuecat.com

We're looking for a Frontend Engineer and an Engineering Project Manager to help us help developers make more money.

https://jobs.lever.co/revenuecat

it sucks pretty bad though

RevenueCat (YC S18) | Infrastructure Engineer | SF or Remote | Full-Time

https://twitter.com/jeiting/status/1233193500906123265

https://jobs.lever.co/revenuecat/ac2ec053-5a38-4b51-b57e-dac...

Jacob here, RevenueCat co-founder and the colleague who ran the data for this post.

The most interesting thing for me about the data is that there was a fairly flat 9% absolute drop in conversions across apps, independent of their base conversion rates. This might suggest that this modal is educating a set of users who simply didn't realize how iOS subscriptions worked.

It's gonna hit apps with already low conversion rates, they might lose half their new business, but I think this will create hardier subscriber bases, and maybe lift the sometimes negative perception of in-app purchases.

Soooooon. :)

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

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

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

Hi Shane!

I've grown a lot since the AppLoop days. :)

As far as not losing motivation, I can't prove a negative, so I won't try.

We are not dead if Apple does something to make the system much better, the problem of multi-channel subscription management will still exist for our largest customers.

P.S. Hope L.A. treats you well. I have scooter envy.

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...

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

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.

Thanks!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.