The subscription backend and churn dashboard for App Store revenue
RevenueCat is a subscription infrastructure and analytics platform for mobile and web apps. It wraps Apple's StoreKit, Google Play Billing, and web checkout behind one SDK and one API, validates receipts, keeps entitlement state in sync across platforms, and reports subscription metrics including churn, retention cohorts, trial conversion, and realised revenue. Alongside the measurement layer it ships genuine retention machinery: a Customer Center that intercepts cancellations with win-back and promotional offers, paywall testing, and targeting. It is free up to $2,500 in monthly tracked revenue, then charges one percent of tracked revenue.
Overview
Mobile subscription revenue is the one place where the usual retention toolchain simply cannot see. Churnkey, Stunning, Baremetrics, and ChartMogul all read a card processor, and an App Store subscription never touches one. Apple and Google hold the billing relationship, the renewal, the grace period, the billing retry, and the cancellation, and they expose it through receipt formats that change without warning. RevenueCat exists because every app company was building the same fragile receipt validation server, getting it subtly wrong, and then having no idea what its actual churn was.
Founded in 2017 by Miguel Carranza and Jacob Eiting, the company grew from a Y Combinator batch into the default subscription backend for independent app developers and, increasingly, for large consumer apps. The vendor reports supporting more than 131,000 apps, handling over two billion API requests a day, and having processed more than $16 billion in revenue. The SDKs are open source, the documentation is unusually good, and the free tier is generous enough that a solo developer can ship a subscription app without paying anything.
The retention relevance runs in two directions. As measurement, RevenueCat gives you churn, retention cohorts, trial-to-paid conversion, refund rates, and realised versus billed revenue for App Store and Google Play subscriptions, which is data no card-processor tool can produce. As intervention, the Customer Center puts a cancellation flow inside your app rather than leaving the customer to Apple's subscription settings screen, capturing a reason, offering a discount or a promotional offer, and routing refund requests before they turn into a store-level cancellation. Win-back campaigns then chase lapsed subscribers.
The pricing model deserves a clear-eyed read. One percent of monthly tracked revenue sounds trivial next to Apple's cut, and at $10,000 in monthly subscription revenue it is $100. At $50,000 it is $500 a month, which is double what a flat-fee retention tool like Churnkey costs, and it keeps scaling. That is the tradeoff of usage pricing: painless while small, a real line item once you are working. There is no percentage of recovered revenue specifically, which is a meaningfully fairer structure than the pay-for-success dunning vendors, because you are paying for infrastructure you would otherwise build and run yourself.
Best for
Any company earning subscription revenue through the App Store or Google Play, from a solo developer under the free threshold to a consumer app at meaningful scale, especially teams that need honest mobile churn numbers and an in-app cancellation flow rather than surrendering the moment to Apple's settings screen.
Not the right fit for
- Pure web SaaS billing through Stripe with no mobile app. You would be paying a percentage of revenue for infrastructure you do not need, and ProfitWell Metrics reports your churn for free.
- Companies whose churn problem is failed cards on recurring web invoices. Apple and Google run their own billing retries and RevenueCat does not replace them, so a dunning tool like Stunning or Churn Buster is the right purchase instead.
- B2B software sold on annual invoices and purchase orders. There is no app store subscription to track and nothing here touches a renewal that dies in procurement.
- Teams at large scale who have not modelled the percentage. At high tracked revenue, one percent becomes a serious number and building in-house starts to pencil, which is exactly the calculation several large apps have made publicly.
- Anyone hoping for deep customer success tooling: health scores across a book of business, CSM playbooks, and account owners. This is consumer subscription infrastructure, not a CS platform.
How it works
- 1
You install the SDK in your app. Swift, Kotlin, React Native, Flutter, Unity, Capacitor, and Cordova are supported, and there is a REST API plus a web billing path built on Stripe for companies selling outside the app stores.
- 2
RevenueCat handles the purchase. It validates the receipt against Apple or Google, records the transaction, and resolves whether the user currently holds an entitlement. Your app asks a single question, whether this user has access, and stops caring which store, platform, or historical price they bought on.
- 3
Subscription state is then kept in sync server-side across renewals, cancellations, billing retries, grace periods, refunds, and cross-platform purchases, which is the part every team underestimates when they consider building it themselves.
- 4
On top of that state, RevenueCat runs the commercial layer: remotely configurable paywalls, A/B and A/B/n experiments on price and presentation, audience targeting, charts and cohort analytics, the Customer Center for in-app cancellation and win-back, and outbound integrations pushing subscription events into analytics, attribution, marketing, and data warehouse tools.
Feature breakdown
26 features in 5 modulesSubscription infrastructure
The part you would otherwise build and then maintain forever.- Cross-platform SDKs
- Open-source SDKs for Swift, Kotlin, React Native, Flutter, Unity, Capacitor, and Cordova, so one integration covers iOS, Android, and the frameworks in between.
- Receipt validation
- Server-side validation against StoreKit and Google Play Billing, including handling for the format and policy changes Apple and Google ship without asking you first.
- Entitlement management
- Your app asks whether a user has access rather than reasoning about products, prices, and stores. Historical purchasers on grandfathered pricing keep working without special-case code.
- Cross-platform subscription state
- A user who subscribed on iOS is recognised on Android and web, which is the single hardest thing to build correctly in-house and the most common source of angry support tickets.
- Web Billing
- A web purchase path with Stripe underneath, letting apps sell outside the stores and keep entitlement state unified with their mobile subscribers.
- REST API and webhooks
- Full API access plus subscription lifecycle webhooks so renewals, cancellations, and billing issues can trigger your own systems.
Churn and retention analytics
The measurement job, on revenue that no card-processor analytics tool can see.- Charts and dashboards
- Active subscriptions, monthly recurring revenue, realised revenue after store commission and refunds, and revenue movement, all from validated transaction data rather than estimates.
- Retention cohorts
- Cohort curves by acquisition month, product, and platform, which is how you find out that your annual plan retains three times better than monthly and should be promoted harder.
- Churn reporting
- Cancellation and lapse rates broken down by product and platform, separating a user who turned off auto-renew from one whose payment failed inside a store billing retry.
- Trial conversion analysis
- Trial start, trial conversion, and trial churn tracked as first-class metrics, since for most consumer apps the trial is where the churn actually happens.
- Refund tracking
- Refund rates surfaced explicitly, including Apple refund requests, which quietly distort revenue reporting for apps that ignore them.
- Predictive and campaign analytics
- Forecasting on subscriber revenue plus performance reporting on the paywalls, experiments, and offers you are running.
Customer Center and churn prevention
The genuine intervention layer, and the reason this belongs in a retention category rather than an analytics one.- In-app cancellation flow
- A drop-in interface that handles cancellation inside your app instead of sending the customer to Apple's subscription settings, where you have no visibility and no chance to respond.
- Save offers at the cancel moment
- Promotional and discounted offers presented immediately before the final cancel action, the mobile equivalent of the cancel-flow deflection that Churnkey and Churn Solution run on the web.
- Cancellation reason capture
- Feedback prompts collect why the subscriber is leaving and the answer drives which offer is shown, which also gives you the only structured voluntary-churn dataset available on mobile.
- Win-back campaigns
- Targeted offers to lapsed subscribers, reaching people who have already gone rather than only those in the act of leaving.
- Self-serve plan changes
- Subscribers can switch plans or restore purchases themselves, which deflects a large share of support tickets and prevents the cancel-in-frustration path.
- Refund request handling
- Refund requests are routed through your interface rather than straight to Apple, so you get a chance to resolve the underlying complaint.
Paywalls, experiments, and targeting
Monetisation tooling that indirectly does more for retention than most retention tools.- Remote paywalls
- Templated, customisable paywalls configured from the dashboard and updated without an app store review cycle, which turns a two-week release loop into a same-day change.
- A/B and A/B/n experiments
- No-code testing on price, plan mix, and paywall presentation with full-funnel reporting through to retained revenue rather than just install-to-purchase.
- Audience targeting
- Different paywalls, prices, and offers for different segments, countries, or cohorts without shipping conditional logic in the app.
- Growth Tools as a standalone
- Paywalls, web-to-app funnels, and experimentation can be bought separately by companies that already run their own in-app purchase infrastructure, priced on conversions those tools drive.
Integrations and data
Getting subscription events into everything else you run.- Analytics and attribution destinations
- Subscription events push into product analytics and mobile measurement partners so acquisition spend can be judged against retained revenue rather than installs.
- Marketing and messaging tools
- Lifecycle and churn events route into messaging platforms so a lapsed subscriber can be contacted through your existing channels.
- Data warehouse export
- Raw subscription data exported for teams that want to model retention themselves rather than accept the dashboard's definitions.
- Stripe for web billing
- Web purchases run on Stripe while entitlements stay unified, so a user's mobile and web subscriptions are one relationship.
Use cases
4 documentedSolo developer launching a subscription app
Building receipt validation, entitlement logic, and a paywall from scratch would consume the entire first month, and getting it wrong means users paying for access they cannot use.
The SDK handles purchase, validation, and entitlement in a day, the paywall is configured from a dashboard, and nothing is owed until monthly tracked revenue passes $2,500.
Consumer app with unexplained mobile churn
Revenue is flat, the App Store dashboard shows aggregate numbers that resist interpretation, and nobody can say whether the problem is trial conversion, month-one churn, or refunds.
Cohort retention, trial conversion, and refund rates by product and platform locate the leak precisely, usually in the first fourteen days, which is a different fix from a plan pricing problem.
App team losing subscribers to Apple's settings screen
Cancellations happen entirely inside iOS, invisibly, with no reason captured and no opportunity to make an offer, and the first sign of trouble is the renewal that never arrives.
Customer Center brings cancellation into the app, captures a reason, and presents a promotional offer before the final tap, which is exactly the deflection pattern that works on the web.
Company selling on both web and mobile
Stripe reports web subscribers, App Store Connect reports mobile ones, and nobody can produce a single retention number for the business without a painful spreadsheet exercise.
RevenueCat unifies entitlements and reporting across store and web billing, and the web figures can still be cross-checked against a free tool like ProfitWell Metrics.
Pricing
from $0 below $2,500 monthly tracked revenue, then 1% of monthly tracked revenueUsage-based percentage of monthly tracked revenue, free below a threshold, with an optional standalone Growth Tools bundle and a negotiated enterprise tier.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Pro | $0 up to $2,500 MTR, then 1% of MTR per month |
There is no feature gating between free and paid; the only variable is how much revenue you track. |
| Growth Tools | 1% of MTR on conversions from the tools used per month |
|
| Enterprise | Custom negotiated |
This is the tier large apps move to precisely because one percent of a very large number stops being reasonable. |
Billing notes
- One percent of monthly tracked revenue is the whole model. At $10,000 in tracked revenue that is $100 a month; at $50,000 it is $500; at $200,000 it is $2,000. Model your own curve before assuming it is cheap.
- For comparison, a flat-fee retention tool such as Churnkey starts around $250 a month regardless of size. RevenueCat is cheaper below roughly $25,000 in tracked revenue and more expensive above it, though it is buying you infrastructure rather than only intervention.
- This is a percentage of tracked revenue, not a percentage of recovered or saved revenue. That is a fairer and more predictable structure than the pay-for-success dunning vendors, where the vendor grades its own contribution.
- The free threshold is real and unmetered on features, which is why so many independent developers start here and stay.
- Enterprise volume discounts exist and are worth asking about well before you become a large customer, because the standard rate is a list price rather than a law.
Value assessment: Below about $25,000 in monthly tracked revenue this is close to unarguable. You are getting subscription infrastructure that would take a competent engineer a month to build badly and forever to maintain, plus analytics you cannot get anywhere else, plus a real cancel-flow layer, for a few hundred dollars or nothing at all. The value question sharpens with scale: at $200,000 tracked revenue you are paying $2,000 a month, and that is the point where teams start pricing an in-house rebuild or negotiating enterprise terms. The honest framing is that RevenueCat is priced as infrastructure that grows with you, and the correct time to renegotiate is before the percentage starts to sting rather than after.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- It is the only serious way to see churn, retention cohorts, and trial conversion on App Store and Google Play revenue, which the entire rest of this category is blind to.
- Customer Center is a genuine churn prevention feature, not analytics dressed up as one, and it moves cancellation from Apple's settings screen into a surface you control.
- The free threshold at $2,500 monthly tracked revenue includes the full product, so small apps get enterprise-grade subscription infrastructure for nothing.
- Remote paywalls and experiments decouple monetisation changes from app store review cycles, which is a substantial operational win in its own right.
- Open-source SDKs across seven platforms and unusually good documentation, which is why implementation is measured in days rather than sprints.
- Very well established, with the vendor reporting more than 131,000 apps and $16 billion in processed revenue, backed by a $50M Series C in 2025.
Limitations
- One percent of tracked revenue scales without limit until you negotiate, and at meaningful revenue it becomes one of your larger software line items.
- It does not and cannot retry failed payments. Apple and Google own billing retries, so involuntary churn is largely outside your control on mobile, whatever tool you buy.
- Irrelevant to pure web SaaS. If your revenue is all Stripe invoices, you are looking at the wrong product.
- No customer success layer: no account health across a book of business, no CSM playbooks, no renewal ownership. It is consumer subscription tooling.
- You are adding a dependency in the critical purchase path, which is a real architectural decision and the reason some large apps eventually bring it in-house.
- Analytics definitions are RevenueCat's own; teams that want to reconcile against store payouts exactly will still spend time on the difference between billed, tracked, and realised revenue.
Head-to-head comparisons
6 alternativesRevenueCat vs ProfitWell Metrics
from $0Complementary rather than competing. ProfitWell Metrics reads card and invoice billing and is free; RevenueCat reads App Store and Google Play and charges one percent. Neither can see the other's revenue. A company selling on both web and mobile should run both, and should expect the two dashboards never to agree exactly because store commission and refunds are handled differently.
Full RevenueCat vs ProfitWell Metrics comparisonRevenueCat vs ChartMogul
from $0 under $10,000 MRR, then $59 per month (Starter)ChartMogul is subscription analytics for a card-processor world with strong segmentation and board-grade reporting, and it can ingest mobile data with work. RevenueCat is native to mobile and adds the infrastructure and the cancel flow. If mobile is most of your revenue, RevenueCat is the source of truth and ChartMogul is the consolidation layer above it.
Full RevenueCat vs ChartMogul comparisonRevenueCat vs Baremetrics
from $75 per month, or $49 per month billed annually (Launch)Baremetrics is Stripe-centred analytics with dunning attached. RevenueCat is App Store subscription infrastructure with analytics attached. There is almost no overlap in what they can see, so the choice is decided entirely by where your money comes from rather than by any feature table.
Full RevenueCat vs Baremetrics comparisonRevenueCat vs Churnkey
from $250 per month billed yearly (Starter)Churnkey runs cancel flows and payment retries on Stripe, Chargebee, Paddle, and similar web billing for a flat fee from $250 a month. RevenueCat's Customer Center does the cancel-flow half on mobile, where Churnkey has no reach at all. An app company with a web product too will end up with both, one per revenue rail.
Full RevenueCat vs Churnkey comparisonRevenueCat vs Grid (formerly SaaSGrid)
from $0 for companies under $1M ARRGrid, formerly SaaSGrid, is finance-facing reporting that consolidates ARR, NDR, and churn across CRM, billing, and accounting sources for a board pack. RevenueCat is the mobile subscription system of record that feeds a number into that pack. They sit at different altitudes and are not alternatives.
Full RevenueCat vs Grid (formerly SaaSGrid) comparisonRevenueCat vs ChurnRecovery
from $20 per monthChurnRecovery is a $20 a month flat-fee cancel flow and dunning tool for Stripe and Paddle. RevenueCat costs one percent of tracked revenue and covers mobile stores where dunning is not even possible. If your subscriptions are in the App Store, ChurnRecovery cannot help you; if they are on Stripe, RevenueCat is the wrong purchase.
Full RevenueCat vs ChurnRecovery comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- One to three days of engineering for a straightforward app, longer if you are migrating existing subscribers from a homegrown receipt validation system. The dashboard-side configuration of paywalls and Customer Center takes hours, not days.
- Learning curve
- Moderate for engineers, who need to understand entitlements and offerings as concepts, and low for the growth and product people who then configure paywalls and offers without shipping code.
- Onboarding
- Entirely self-serve up to enterprise scale, with documentation that is genuinely among the best in developer tooling. Enterprise accounts get dedicated support.
- Migration notes
- Migrating an existing subscriber base is the real work: historical purchases must be resolved into entitlements so existing customers do not lose access at launch. RevenueCat documents this path, but plan a staged rollout rather than a hard cutover, and expect to reconcile store payout reports against tracked revenue for a couple of cycles.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- iOS and StoreKitAndroid and Google Play BillingReact NativeFlutterUnityCapacitor and CordovaWeb via Web BillingSmart TV platforms
- API
- Full REST API, open-source SDKs across seven client platforms, and subscription lifecycle webhooks. The vendor reports handling more than two billion API requests a day.
- Compliance
- SOC 2GDPR
- Data residency
- Not published as a customer-selectable option on standard tiers; enterprise arrangements are negotiated.
- SSO
- Available on enterprise arrangements; standard accounts use conventional dashboard authentication.
- Security notes
- RevenueCat sits in the purchase path, which is a deliberate architectural dependency. Receipt validation happens server-side rather than on-device, which is the correct posture for preventing purchase spoofing but does mean entitlement resolution depends on a third party's availability.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email supportCommunity forumDedicated support and SLAs on enterprise
- Documentation
- Extensive developer documentation, SDK guides, migration playbooks, and an API reference; widely cited as best in class among subscription tooling.
- Community
- Active developer community plus a large body of published mobile subscription benchmark research, including the State of Subscription Apps report.
Company
- Founded
- 2017
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California, operating remote-first
- Ownership
- Venture-backed
- Founders
- Jacob Eiting, Miguel Carranza
- Employees
- Roughly 170 (reported 2026)
- Funding
- More than $118M raised in total, including a $12M Series C in 2024 led by Adjacent and a $50M round in May 2025 led by Bain Capital Ventures, with Index Ventures, Y Combinator, Adjacent, Volo Ventures, and SaaStr Fund participating.
Funding history
| Round | Amount | Year | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Y Combinator and seed | Undisclosed | 2018 | Started as receipt validation infrastructure for independent app developers. |
| Series B | $15M | 2021 | Index Ventures led, as the product expanded from infrastructure into analytics. |
| Series C | $12M | 2024 | Led by Adjacent, bringing total funding past $68M. |
| Series C extension | $50M | 2025 | Led by Bain Capital Ventures with existing investors participating. |
Timeline
- 2017Founded by Jacob Eiting and Miguel Carranza to solve in-app purchase receipt validation, a problem every subscription app was solving badly in-house.
- 2018Goes through Y Combinator and becomes the default subscription backend for independent iOS and Android developers.
- 2021Raises a $15M Series B led by Index Ventures and expands from pure infrastructure into subscription analytics and charts.
- 2023Ships remotely configurable Paywalls and Experiments, decoupling monetisation changes from app store release cycles.
- 2024Raises a $12M Series C led by Adjacent; launches Customer Center, bringing in-app cancellation flows and win-back offers to mobile subscriptions.
- 2025Raises $50M led by Bain Capital Ventures and expands into Web Billing, unifying store and web subscriptions under one entitlement model.
Integrations
- Apple App Store and StoreKit
- Google Play Billing
- Stripe (Web Billing)
- Mobile measurement and attribution partners
- Product analytics platforms
- Marketing and lifecycle messaging tools
- Data warehouse exports
- Slack
- Webhooks and REST API
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat is RevenueCat?
RevenueCat is subscription infrastructure and analytics for apps. One SDK wraps Apple's StoreKit, Google Play Billing, and web checkout, handles receipt validation and entitlements, and reports subscription metrics including churn, retention cohorts, and trial conversion. It also ships paywalls, experiments, and a Customer Center that intercepts cancellations with offers.
How much does RevenueCat cost?
It is free while monthly tracked revenue stays at or below $2,500, with no feature restrictions. Above that it charges one percent of monthly tracked revenue. A standalone Growth Tools bundle for paywalls and experimentation is charged at one percent of the revenue those tools convert, and enterprise pricing is negotiated with volume discounts.
Is one percent expensive compared with a flat fee?
It depends entirely on your size. At $10,000 in monthly tracked revenue you pay $100 and a flat-fee retention tool like Churnkey would cost $250. At $50,000 you pay $500 and the flat fee is still $250. Above roughly $25,000 in tracked revenue the percentage model costs more, which is why enterprise discounts exist and why large apps negotiate.
Does RevenueCat prevent churn or only measure it?
Both, but asymmetrically. Customer Center is real prevention: it moves cancellation into your app, captures a reason, and presents a promotional offer before the final tap, plus win-back campaigns for lapsed subscribers. What it cannot do is recover failed payments, because Apple and Google own billing retries on store subscriptions.
Can RevenueCat handle failed payments and dunning?
Not on store subscriptions, and no tool can. Apple and Google run their own billing retry and grace period logic and expose the outcome rather than the controls. RevenueCat reports what happened so you can see how much of your churn was involuntary, but the retry schedule is not yours to set. Dunning tools like Stunning and Churn Buster only apply to card billing you control.
Does it work for web SaaS billing through Stripe?
Web Billing exists and runs on Stripe, so a company selling on both mobile and web can unify entitlements. But if you are pure web SaaS with no app, RevenueCat is the wrong purchase and you would be paying a percentage of revenue for infrastructure you do not need. ProfitWell Metrics reports web churn for free.
How much engineering work is the installation?
One to three days for a new app: install the SDK, define entitlements, and wire the paywall. Customer Center is described as a single line of code plus dashboard configuration. Migrating an existing subscriber base from homegrown receipt validation is the harder project, because historical purchases must be resolved into entitlements before cutover.
What about annual invoiced customers?
There is no path here at all. RevenueCat tracks store and web subscription purchases; a B2B renewal that dies in a procurement conversation is invisible to it, as it is to every automated tool in this category. Reaching invoiced annual customers is a human job for a CSM or founder, supported by something like Akita rather than by subscription infrastructure.
Which analytics can RevenueCat show that Stripe-based tools cannot?
Everything about App Store and Google Play revenue: subscription counts, cohort retention, trial-to-paid conversion, refund rates, realised revenue after store commission, and churn split by product and platform. Card-processor tools such as Baremetrics or ChartMogul never see this data because no card transaction exists.
How established is RevenueCat?
It was founded in 2017 by Jacob Eiting and Miguel Carranza, has raised more than $118M including a $50M round in 2025 led by Bain Capital Ventures, employs roughly 170 people, and reports supporting more than 131,000 apps with over $16 billion in processed revenue.
Editorial verdict
If any part of your subscription revenue comes from the App Store or Google Play, RevenueCat is not really optional. It is the only practical way to see mobile churn honestly, the SDK saves a month of engineering and a lifetime of maintenance, and Customer Center is a real cancel-flow intervention rather than a dashboard pretending to be one. The free threshold means a small app pays nothing while it finds out whether it has a business. The thing to be deliberate about is the percentage: model what one percent of tracked revenue costs you at three times your current size, because that is the number that eventually sends teams to the negotiating table or to a build-versus-buy review. Buy it for mobile, do not buy it for web-only SaaS, and never expect it to solve failed payments, because on store billing that lever belongs to Apple.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.
Awards & badges
1 heldRevenueCat holds 1 award from the SaaSTracker editorial program. Badges may be displayed by the vendor; each embed links back to this profile.
Momentum · Retention & Churn Prevention
“The default subscription backend for app businesses, now turning that billing position into a full churn and retention dashboard.”
<a href="https://saastracker.org/products/revenuecat"><img src="https://saastracker.org/badges/embed/revenuecat/momentum-summer-2026.svg" width="180" height="180" alt="RevenueCat: Momentum, Retention & Churn Prevention. SaaSTracker Summer 2026 Awards." /></a>
