New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: RevenueCat (YC S18) – Simple API for Managing In-App Subscriptions

Launch HN: RevenueCat (YC S18) – Simple API for Managing In-App Subscriptions
95 by jeiting | 40 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN! We’re Jacob and Miguel, founders of RevenueCat ( https://ift.tt/2ifuWwg ). 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://ift.tt/1ro0GS4 ), 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.