RevenueCat

In-app subscription infrastructure billed at 1 percent of tracked revenue measured before the app store takes its cut

As of 30 August 2026, RevenueCat is free to use. An SDK and backend that handles receipt validation, entitlements and subscription state across the App Store, Google Play, Stripe and the web. Softwr lists it under Mobile Development. RevenueCat is made by RevenueCat, Inc., available on iOS, Android, Web.

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Overview

What RevenueCat does

RevenueCat sits between an app and the store billing systems. The SDK reports purchases, the backend validates receipts, resolves subscription state across platforms and exposes a single entitlement check the app can trust. It handles renewals, grace periods, billing retries, refunds, cross-platform restore and the differences between StoreKit and Google Play Billing, all of which are the parts of in-app subscriptions that consume engineering time without producing product. On top of that it provides remote-configured paywalls, experiments and a revenue charts product. The pricing model is the fact worth carrying. There is no seat charge; the fee is 1 percent of monthly tracked revenue once you pass 2,500 USD in a month. Critically, the vendor bases pricing on pre-platform-cut revenue, a point it addresses directly in its own pricing FAQ. Apple or Google take 15 or 30 percent before you see anything, so 1 percent of gross is closer to 1.2 to 1.4 percent of what actually lands. The bill also grows in exact proportion to success, which means the invoice is largest in the month you are most stretched, and at 1,000,000 USD of monthly tracked revenue the 10,000 USD monthly line item starts to be weighed against the cost of an in-house billing team. Buyers are consumer app developers and small mobile teams for whom subscription plumbing is not a differentiator, and the value at small scale is unambiguous: it is free until you are earning, and it removes weeks of receipt validation work. The trade-off is a switching cost that grows with the bill. Entitlement state and subscriber history live in RevenueCat, so leaving means rebuilding validation, migrating historical receipts and accepting a period where subscription state is being served from two places at once.

What people use it for

A small app team shipping subscriptions on both stores without writing two receipt validation backends
Changing paywall pricing and layout without waiting for app review
Running a price experiment and attributing realised revenue rather than checkout events to each variant
Giving finance a single view of subscription revenue across App Store, Google Play and web purchases

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about RevenueCat.

The fee is 1 percent of revenue measured before the app store takes 15 or 30 percent, so the effective rate against money you actually receive is closer to 1.2 to 1.4 percent, a distinction that is easy to miss when modelling the cost.
The bill scales with success rather than with usage or headcount, so the largest invoice arrives in the month of your best growth, which is exactly when cash is committed elsewhere.
At high revenue the arithmetic turns against you: 1 million USD of monthly tracked revenue is 10,000 USD a month, at which point building and staffing receipt validation in-house becomes a serious comparison rather than a hypothetical one.
Subscriber and entitlement state lives in the vendor system, so migrating away requires re-validating historical receipts and running dual sources of truth during the transition, and that switching cost grows the longer you stay.
Growth features such as paywalls and web funnels are charged at the same 1 percent of what they track, so revenue attributed to those tools is billed even where you already had the infrastructure to handle it.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of RevenueCat

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

RevenueCatvs
Adapty
Adapty: A direct competitor with the same percentage model but a higher 5,000 USD free threshold and separately priced add-ons
RevenueCatvs
Firebase
Firebase: The do-it-yourself route using store billing plus Remote Config, with no revenue share and considerably more engineering
RevenueCatvs
Paddle
Paddle: Better when a merchant-of-record handling tax and web checkout matters more than in-app store plumbing

Pricing

What RevenueCat costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Pro under threshold

Free

Free up to 2,500 USD in monthly tracked revenue
All product features included
No seat charges
Community and standard support

Pro

On request

1 percent of monthly tracked revenue above 2,500 USD
Tracked revenue is measured before the app store commission
No minimum commitment stated
Growth tools such as paywalls and funnels charged at the same 1 percent

Enterprise

On request

Quoted
Volume discounts
Flexible tracking configuration
Custom SLAs and dedicated support

Capabilities

Features

Cross-platform entitlements
One entitlement check resolves a subscription bought on iOS, Android, web or Stripe
Server-side receipt validation
Handles StoreKit and Google Play Billing edge cases including renewals, grace periods and refunds
Remote paywalls
Paywall layout and pricing configured server side and changed without an app release
Experiments
Split tests on price, packaging and paywall design with revenue reported per variant
Revenue charts and cohorts
Subscription analytics including retention, churn and realised revenue by cohort
Integrations and webhooks
Subscription events pushed to analytics, engagement and data warehouse destinations

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is it really free to start?

Yes, up to 2,500 USD in monthly tracked revenue, with all features included and no seat charges.

Is the 1 percent taken from gross or net revenue?

Gross. The vendor bases pricing on pre-platform-cut revenue, so the app store commission is not deducted before the fee is calculated.

What happens if RevenueCat is unavailable?

The SDK caches entitlement state locally so existing subscribers usually keep access, but new purchases and restores depend on the service.

At what point should I build this in-house?

Somewhere above a few hundred thousand dollars of monthly tracked revenue the annual fee funds engineers, though it also buys cross-platform correctness you then own forever.

Keep looking

Where to go from RevenueCat

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for RevenueCat, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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