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.
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.
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.
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 [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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.