Helping developers make (even) more money

Happy Shiptember, everyone!

I’m surprisingly excited to introduce the third iteration of pricing for RevenueCat, which is cheaper (or even free) for most customers, and brings our complete feature set to tens of thousands of new developers. Surprisingly excited, because most of the time, pricing changes suck.

A little trip down memory lane.

Pricing is hard.

As we talk about a lot on Sub Club, pricing matters. When we first sat down to work on the idea that became RevenueCat, we really didn’t know how to price it. My first stab was to build something based on the number of subscribers you had: (forgive the cringey branding)

This pricing model survived all of about 2 weeks when it became clear that 20 subscribers could mean something very different from one app to another. I then tried to charge everyone 3.5% of their revenue, which wasn’t very popular either. We eventually landed on our first real packaging that stuck: charging $119/mo or $499/mo initially, with overages past certain amounts. 

This worked for a couple of years, but it had a lot of issues. The biggest being we were often asking developers with little or no revenue to give us hundreds of dollars a month. For a developer just launching something, this can be extremely cost prohibitive. We’d end up handing out a lot of “free trials” and custom deals just to overcome this limitation. 

That’s when we decided to introduce “developer friendly pricing”, and drop the floor of our price to $0. If you made no money, we made no money. A much better alignment than a regressive tax that charged smaller apps a higher proportion of their revenue just to make money.

This pricing set RevenueCat back a bit in the short term on our own revenue, but did succeed in democratizing access to our platform. However, we think we can do more.

Introducing really developer friendly pricing

In some ways, our third version of pricing that we’re launching today is the step I wish we would’ve taken in 2021. Just one self-serve plan, “Pro” and we’ve made it 20% cheaper. We’re gonna lose a lot of money on this but I think it’s worth it. Our current pricing still forces people to make too many choices about what RC features they really need, what they can afford etc. With our new pricing, one package gets you our full suite of growth features.

To make that work, we had to tweak the Pro plan a little:

• The feature set doesn’t change. Pro is still the place where you get everything you need to grow your app, from Experiments, to Apple Search Ad reporting, numerous integrations, Paywalls, and more
• We’re making Pro free up to $2,500 USD in tracked revenue. We will only charge you in months where your MTR surpasses $2,500 USD, and in every other month you’ll pay us zero dollars. 
• We’re dropping the price of Pro from 1.2% to 1.0% of tracked revenue

Taken together, these changes are meant to make it even easier for you to use RevenueCat to build, analyze, and grow your subscription apps.

For new users starting with RevenueCat today, Pro will be the default.

If you’re currently on a Pro plan and the new Pro plan saves you money without losing any features, we’ll automatically migrate you.

For folks still on Legacy Analyze and Grow plans, you’re free to stay on those as well.

Enterprise and apps at scale

For our biggest customers looking for a more direct relationship, we offer two options:

Scale – Jump to the front of the support line, unlimited collaborators, custom data exports and more. Plans start at $1,700/mo with an annual commitment and can be set up quickly.

Enterprise – For our customers with the most complex cases or business needs, our sales team will work with you to design a custom package and integration plan that suits your unique needs as a business. 

A developer-aligned business

I’m a big believer in incentives driving behavior. I believe that aligning RevenueCat’s incentives as an organization to the success of our developers will ensure we do the right things, without me jumping up and down everyday and saying “do the right things.” 

We help you make money, you make great software, the world becomes a little bit better.