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.
https://twitter.com/RevenueCat/status/1697253094520967183
Hey HN! It's been a while but I wanted to pop back in to share that we just shipped paywalls: a remotely configurable, App Store compliant, and testable paywall out of the box.We shied away from building this for longer than we should have but it's such a huge component of making more money on the app stores we just had to.It relies on native components, but is configurable from the web, which...
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.
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.
I've made CEO-noise again and hopefully we can keep pushing on these two.
I dug into both tickets. A bunch of failures both in product and process on our part. Going to dig in more.
Would you mind dropping me an email [email protected]? 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.
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.
We're looking for a Frontend Engineer and an Engineering Project Manager to help us help developers make more money.
https://twitter.com/jeiting/status/1233193500906123265
https://jobs.lever.co/revenuecat/ac2ec053-5a38-4b51-b57e-dac...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.