from Hacker News

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

by jeiting on 7/25/18, 4:53 PM with 42 comments

Hello HN! We’re Jacob and Miguel, founders of RevenueCat (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), 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.

  • by ridruejo on 7/25/18, 5:25 PM

    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

  • by cridenour on 7/25/18, 6:07 PM

    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.

  • by baldajan on 7/25/18, 5:43 PM

    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.

  • by adanhn on 7/25/18, 5:13 PM

    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?

  • by ductionist on 7/25/18, 8:24 PM

    This looks amazing and is definitely much-needed.

    Any plans to add an SDK for the Microsoft Store?

  • by yodon on 7/26/18, 8:21 AM

    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.

  • by austenallred on 7/25/18, 8:32 PM

    Why has this not existed before?

  • by gdilla on 7/25/18, 5:01 PM

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

  • by cmuguythrow on 7/25/18, 5:07 PM

    Typo :^)

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

  • by orasis on 7/25/18, 6:14 PM

    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.

  • by bonquit on 7/25/18, 9:34 PM

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

  • by orliesaurus on 7/25/18, 7:34 PM

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