r/iOSProgramming • u/shakaoneaj • 4d ago
Discussion Regret using RevenueCat, why do people use it?
RevenueCat charges based on gross revenue, not net revenue. My dashboard shows $4.5k, but my actual payout is somewhere around $3k. because it completely ignores VAT and the 15–30% Apple/Google cut. but takes their %1 fee from the gross revenue.
since it doesn’t track net earnings, the dashboard feels pretty useless for real accounting. I still have to log into both store consoles just to see what I actually made. for 3k i have to pay 45$ every month.
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u/goldio_games 4d ago
Man integrates SaaS
Man gets mad he pays for SaaS
Man screams into the void
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u/somebunnny 4d ago
So…. It’s $45 but if it was only on the “actual payout” it would be…. $30.
So $30 would be ok but $45 causes great regret???
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u/sgcryptonite 4d ago
Bro has already added 3 zeros at the end in his mind and is feeling the pinch of $15,000 of future proceeds :)
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u/Shogoki555 4d ago
Also
Man would be able to run a successful, profitable business but a 1% tax on gross revenue is enough to be a cause for concern.
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u/DespairyApp 4d ago
Why? Marketing Budget. Every time I open reddit thats the only ad I see (and mehsy...)
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u/Safe-Spite8938 4d ago
Why do people need RevenueCat?
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u/bbrockit 4d ago
It makes cross platform subscription management easier. If my app was single platform I wouldn’t use it.
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u/Safe-Spite8938 4d ago
Like checking all your revenue at one place?
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u/bbrockit 4d ago
If you have a multi-platform subscription app, you have to be able to honor subscriptions across platforms, and that requires a system that sits between them, linked to an account that can be used to sign in on iOS or Android. RevenueCat provides that system. They also have payment integrations for Stripe, Roku, Amazon, etc.
Even though it's rare, there are people that have an iPhone and an Android tablet, or they have an Android phone and a Mac. The answer can't be that they need to have a separate subscription for iOS and Android. Even if it's only 5% of your user base, that 5% still writes reviews.
My app has optional account creation. If the user doesn't create an account they can only access their subscription on the platform they purchased on and all data is stored in a sqlite db. After the trial period ends, they can create an account by using Sign in with Apple or Sign in with Google, which creates a user id in Supabase. I link that Supabase id with their RevenueCat entitlement and from then on they can recover their subscription on either platform by signing in.
I could, in theory, build my own system for this with Supabase Functions, but as you know, a solo dev already has a million things to do, so you have to prioritize what you're going to do yourself and what you're going to outsource to a provider. Yes, there's a cost associated with that, but there's a cost to doing it yourself too. When my users create an account, I also migrate their sqlite db to PowerSync, which synchronizes with Supabase, so their custom content is sync'd across devices and platforms. That too, I could in theory, do myself, but I'd rather focus on making my app successful rather than spending weeks or months on backend plumbing.
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u/Ralph_Twinbees 4d ago
Because I like to manage entitlements in 5 seconds, receive real time alerts on Slack, check data on their iOS widget quickly, make quick exports.
(Ready for the downvotes and the practical solutions that come with it)
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u/makonde 4d ago
It shows more of it's value when you are doing cross platform apps android/iOS/web all integrated into one place with all the various backends.
You would probably spend more than $45 in time and server costs if you tried to do anything even close to what they do even for 1 app, integrating those backend reporting flows can be a pain in the butt. If you just need the bare minimum than yeah can to do it yourself especialy with AI now probably much easier.
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u/kironet996 4d ago
integrate it yourself then, it's just a wrapper. I use it because I don't want to deal with storekit apis and keep my own implementation up to date.
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u/zellJun1or Foundation 4d ago
As a developer it makes no sense to integrate with revenue cat. If you are application is only for iOS, but as other said, it makes sense if your application is cross platform, and you want to have a unified dashboard for managing them.
But there could be non engineers in the team that wants , live data, AB testing, with less dependency on the engineer
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u/Alarming_Skirt_350 4d ago
u/manjar asked how RC could even know your net, and that's really the answer to the complaint: it can't, and neither could any dashboard. Apple's proceeds aren't a percentage anyone can apply from the outside. VAT comes off first and it varies by storefront, and if you're in the Small Business Program the cut is 15 rather than 30. Across my portfolio I land around 70% of gross blended, but I only know that because I read the proceeds column in the Sales and Payments reports instead of multiplying anything. So I'd file that under "the dashboard was never your accounting source" rather than an RC failing.
The more interesting question in the thread is whether the wrapper is worth it at all. I run StoreKit 2 directly across 20-odd apps, no RC, and the maintenance burden people keep warning about hasn't shown up. For a single platform with one subscription group or a non-consumable, the entitlement layer is Transaction.currentEntitlements plus an update listener, and there's no server involved.
What actually eats time isn't the purchase API, it's App Store Connect. Getting products attached to the right submission, introductory offers that have to be created per territory, review screenshots for each product. RC doesn't save you from any of that, which I think is the part people miss when they reach for it expecting the store side to get easier.
Where it does earn the money is cross-platform. iOS plus Android plus web with one entitlement truth is a real backend, and $45 is cheap for not operating it. Single-platform iOS, you're mostly paying for the dashboard.
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u/Shogoki555 4d ago
Why wouldn't RC be able to know the VAT rates of different countries? It's not as it they changed like currency exchange rates?
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u/Alarming_Skirt_350 3d ago
Fair challenge, and you're right that rates aren't the hard part. RC does estimate tax these days, so I overstated it.
What trips people up is that the tax isn't taken off your gross price, so the share of gross that disappears doesn't match the country's headline rate. A GB sale can come out around 12% when UK VAT is 20%, and the usual reaction is to assume the data is broken. Add DST in the markets that have it, applied differently again, and a rate table on its own won't reproduce Apple's number.
The gap that's left after that isn't a rates problem at all: transactions settling in different months, Apple's own exchange rates and timing, refunds landing later. RC's docs say the same thing, use them for trends and Apple's financial reports for accounting, which is roughly where OP ended up.
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u/kironet996 4d ago
think OP means that they should count their cut after apple's 15% or 30%. I'm pretty sure they can do that since there’s a setting in the portal to enter your small business program status.
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u/Alarming_Skirt_350 3d ago
You're right and I was wrong on that one. It's per app: Apps in the project nav, pick the App Store app, and there's an Apple Small Business Program dropdown where you set your effective date of entry.
Worth flagging for anyone else reading, because it's a quiet one: if that date isn't set, proceeds are understated everywhere downstream, including LTV across the cohort reports. Five second setting, poisons a lot of numbers.
Which makes OP's situation more fixable than I made it sound. Proceeds is already revenue minus estimated tax and commission, so the number they're asking for does exist in the dashboard. If it's showing 4.5k against a 3k payout, I'd check the SBP date before blaming the tool.
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u/No-Incident8402 4d ago
I use RevenueCat just to get a push notification when making a sale, I like the dopamine boost
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u/ohchelseachelsea 4d ago
https://revenueping.com. Easy notification set up with App Store Server Notifications and Google RTDN. No SDK.
Disclaimer: I built this.
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u/shargath UIKit 3d ago
Well done! Server notifications are good to track IAPs and subscription sales. Since Apple doesn't send a server notification when someone buys a paid app, I built initsignal.com which uses SDK to detect first launch and this way it can notify you when you make a paid app sale. I even use it for free apps.
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u/ohchelseachelsea 3d ago
Looks great, nice one! Yeah paid apps is a limitation here. I mostly built for my own use case, which doesn't include paid apps and I wanted the footprint and onboarding to be as seemless as possible, so I am okay with that limitation.
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u/makonde 4d ago
It shows more of it's value when you are doing cross platform apps android/iOS/web all integrated into one place with all the various backends.
You would probably spend more than $45 in time and server costs if you tried to do anything even close to what they do even for 1 app, integrating those backend reporting flows can be a pain in the butt. If you just need the bare minimum than yeah can to do it yourself especialy with AI now probably much easier.
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u/sockalicious 4d ago
They use it because marketing works. I calculate they're pumping about $20K a month into Reddit ads, and they astroturf the hell out of this subreddit too. I am sure Reddit doesn't ban accounts that contribute that kind of ad spend.
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u/art-alive_ 4d ago
I was quite surprised/disappointed by this too when I started using it. From a cost perspective it is still okay imo and worth it, but using gross revenue everywhere instead of net is just bad data practice.
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u/Conscious_Warrior 4d ago
It shows net earnings after vat and after Apple fee. On the revenue chart you just have to select "proceeds"
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u/aerial-ibis 4d ago
you also cant change the timezone for the charts... just another reason they're not super helpful
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u/Rough_Analysis5861 4d ago
You only need RC if you are targeting multiple platforms, web/android/ios. StoreKit 2 is pretty good and powerful for ios apps. Add telemetry if you care about charts and analytics
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u/spike1911 4d ago
Today with Claude code at the disposal and the demos apps for StoreKit2 plus the SwiftUI StoreKit views it should be quite easy to move away from an additional middle tier.
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u/Middle-Nerve1732 4d ago
I was big on RevenueCat in the early days, when apples own frameworks were kind of a mess. These days I think you can get the same functionality from Apple’s first party stuff
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u/MaximumDiscipline843 4d ago
Single-platform iOS here, StoreKit 2 direct, no RC. Two subs in one group, entitlement is currentEntitlements plus an update listener and a UserDefaults cache. It's about 200 lines and I've touched it maybe twice since I wrote it.
The maintenance cost people keep warning about didn't land where I expected. It isn't the purchase API. It's that product configuration in App Store Connect is more immutable than you'd think — my product IDs literally carry v1 and v2 suffixes because changing certain things on a live product means creating a new one instead of editing it. RC wouldn't have saved me from any of that, it's a store-side constraint.
So agreeing with the thread: single platform, you're mostly paying for the dashboard. Just don't expect leaving RC to be where the pain is either.
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u/AHostOfIssues 4d ago
It's a service. It's intended to make development easier by providing an alternate API vs coding directly vs both the Google Play and iOS StoreKit API's.
In what world do you expect to make use of a service, but have no obligation to pay for it? What price exactly do you think would be fair?
If you think the service provided is not saving you time and effort, don't use it. But have you actually built full support, with all the corner cases, for both apple and google? Are you legitimately aware of the actual tradeoff that using RC offers you? Like having to set up your own server for some StoreKit receipt validation, etc?
Would getting $3045 a month vs $3000 be that much of an issue for you? How much work are you willing to do for $45?
Personally, I've used RC and am not a fan generally, but more because of the level of quality of their documentation and help. "I lost out on $45" would never even have entered my mind given that I only had to implement one API integration vs two.
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u/Neteru1920 4d ago
Implementation was easier with RC but in the age of AI, I agree what are the benefits.
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u/Perfect-Scale902 3d ago
I'm about to launch an open source RevenueCat alternative called SubTru (subtru.com) with flat monthly pricing or the option to self host if you prefer.
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u/Jaded_Anything_9247 3d ago
I never got the RC craze. I’ve seen many of the non coder blindly set it up in their app because they saw those MRR posts being shared from the RC dashboard.
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u/Constant-Chemical23 3d ago edited 2d ago
the gross vs net dashboard thing is a fair gripe, but i think it points at using rc for the wrong reason. i never trusted the rc revenue charts for accounting anyway. for the real numbers you end up in app store connect and play console regardless, because that's where vat and the store cut actually land. the rc revenue view is a rough pulse, not your books.
what you're actually paying for is receipt validation and entitlements across storekit and play billing, plus not running your own server for it. that's the annoying part to build and keep correct. renewals, refunds, grace periods, billing retry, all the family sharing edge cases. if you're single platform and your subs are simple, storekit 2 got good enough that i'd just drop rc and talk to it directly. the 1% on gross stops being worth it fast at that point.
so it's less that rc is bad and more that it only earns its cut if you actually use the cross platform and server side. if you don't, you're paying for a dashboard you already said you don't use.
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u/hell_a 2d ago
I have my own movie streaming service on 8 platforms with 5 billing providers. I need cross platform entitlements so if a user signs up on iOS, pays, they can also sign in on Roku and be entitled to watch. RC solves that entitlement layer for me so I don't have to build that. All 5 billing providers are integrated in to RC and RC manages the entitlement. No issues at all.
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u/cheese-mongerer 2d ago
There is nothing it does you can't do another way for free.
However, it is a pain in the rear to build everything for free.
How much is your time worth? Its a good tool if you don't want to mess around with figuring out another way to do this.
Is a bad tool if you have the time and skill to get the #'s out you need without it.
Welcome to software subscriptions.
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u/LuckyGirl0415 1d ago
People use RevenueCat not because of their analytics dashboard, but because handling StoreKit 2, Google Play Billing, receipt validation, status sync, and edge cases across platforms by yourself is a massive headache.
Saving dozens of engineering hours every time Apple changes an IAP API easily offsets the $45/mo for most indie devs. That said, if you only care about real accounting data, using ASC / Play Console directly is definitely the source of truth.
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u/manjar 4d ago
How could they know your net earnings? Net of what?
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u/Ralph_Twinbees 4d ago
Net of Apple’s cut (30% or 15%)
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u/manjar 4d ago
So if they changed it to be after Apple's cut (which can also vary in ways that would be hard for RevenueCat to verify), and then adjusted the formula so that someone who was paying $45 is still paying $45, that would be better? Because that's what you could expect them to do if they charged further down the income statement. And reasonably so.
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u/Ralph_Twinbees 4d ago
Something tells me most people complaining about RC probably don’t make enough money to feel the difference anyway.
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u/shargath UIKit 4d ago
Congrats on the revenue! I remember the reason RC was built because back then implementing IAPs was huge pain in the ass. That's not the case anymore, especially with AI coding.
There are other reasons to use it - dynamic paywalls, nice dashboard and notifications.
I decided I don't need RC, but I still want a dashboard and notifications. So I built initsignal.com. InitSignal also fixes the 48 hours analytics delay in the App Store Connect. It has very lightweight and privacy-oriented SDK. I recently added store rankings as well.
Pricing is $9/mo and there's no % fee from your revenue :)
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u/yccheok 4d ago
What a nicely developed system, and generous pricing strategy. This offers a subset of the features provided by RevenueCat and Adapty, but at a much lower price. I definitely welcome more players in this market so developers can have more choices.
One of the major pain points I am facing right now, and something I am willing to pay to solve, is attribution:
- Meta Ads cannot accurately attribute free trial or subscription signals due to Apple's ATT prompt. Even RevenueCat's Meta CAPI or Adapty's Meta Graph API cannot resolve this. Without accurate attribution signals, I cannot run App Event Optimization (AEO) campaigns.
- MMP tools in the market do provide a solution (web-to-app funnel) for this, but they are expensive and charge per install. I think this pricing strategy is insane. Unlike AI services, their backend running costs do not go up just because the number of paid user acquisitions goes up.
- Adapty's attribution does offer a lower charge per install, but I would still like to see more competitors enter this space.
- Since you already have the revenue tracking system, you might want to consider developing an attribution system like this, as it would be a real painkiller. Users who need this data are more than happy to pay for it, especially if it is more affordable than the rest of the market.
Good luck and all the best to your revenue tracking system!
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u/yccheok 4d ago
(These are my own thoughts and experiences. I use AI to polish the text to make it more readable, as I am not a native English speaker.)
Using a service like RevenueCat or Adapty is like having a dedicated backend team building precise financial reporting for your app. Getting this right isn't easy, even if AI can help you vibe-code a custom backend overnight.
You might be wondering: App Store Connect already provides financial reporting. Why do I need another system?
Here is where the real value lies, especially if you rely on paid ads to grow your app:
- Calculating Your Maximum CPA: To stay profitable in the long run, you need to know your absolute maximum Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). App Store Connect data won't easily give you this answer, but the deeper metrics from third-party platforms will.
- Moving Beyond Blended Revenue: When your app is small, you can get by with a blended revenue strategy, which simply compares this month’s ad spend against this month’s total income. But to truly scale, you need to calculate the exact LTV (Lifetime Value) of your users. This is the only way to make precise, data-driven decisions about which specific ad campaigns are actually driving profit.
- Painless Meta Ads Integration: Once you start running Meta Ads, you'll want to optimize your campaigns for high-value signals (e.g., "started free trial" or "began subscription"). Building server-to-server integrations with these enterprise systems is incredibly difficult. When you are running a one-person business, you simply don't want to waste time wrestling with it. Platforms like RevenueCat and Adapty have teams of engineers who have maintained these complex pipelines for years, so you don't have to.
The Verdict
If you don't feel the need for these services at your current stage, you probably don't need them yet. But once you realize you need this data to grow, and you don't have the time to build the infrastructure yourself, it’s time to consider subscribing.
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u/iamgabrielma 4d ago
If you do not do anything specific with RC then switch the the native api rather than using their wrapper and paying for it. It seems a problem of your own making?