How indie devs can get the most out of RevenueCat’s Pro features

RevenueCat just rolled out a new pricing structure. For those of you on our old Free or Starter plans, you’ll now have access to a bunch of new RevenueCat features if you migrate to the new plan.

While many of these features were previously limited to only our Pro plans, they’re actually incredibly useful for indie developers! Let’s go through some of them and how you can start using them today to help grow your business.

Charts

If you’ve been on our Free plan, the new Pro plan includes RevenueCat’s incredible charts. When you click the charts tab at the top of the RevenueCat dashboard, you’ll be greeted with a list of powerful charts to give you a better understanding of your business.

Charts are even more powerful using the “Segments” dropdown to break down the data even further. You can break down your Active Subscriptions by product or even create a “layer cake” chart by setting your MRR chart’s segment to “First purchase month”, view option to “Stacked area”, and date range to “All time”.

There’s so many valuable charts you can see here, so explore! You’re bound to find some valuable insights to help your unique business.

Apple Search Ads Attribution

If you use Apple Search Ads (which you should definitely try if you haven’t yet), RevenueCat has an integration to pull in that data from Apple. This data then shows up in RevenueCat charts.

You can then segment charts by campaigns or ad groups to gain a better understanding of the impact your advertising has on your business.

This segmentation is vital to determine the effectiveness of your Apple Search Ads and how much each ad is worth it for you. If you’re getting a lot of downloads through ads, but those downloads are converting to paid at a lower rate than your organically acquired users, those ads won’t be worth as much as you may think just by looking at your non-segmented customer lifetime value!

Diving into these charts can help you determine where you make improvements in your subscription lifecycle to make search ads a net positive for your business.

Slack Integration

RevenueCat has a growing list of 3rd party integrations that all plans now have access to. One of the simplest integrations you can set up right away is our Slack integration.

In a few minutes, you can set up a dedicated channel in your Slack instance to post every time an in-app purchase event happens in your iOS or Android app.

As an indie I find it really motivating to see realtime updates about real people purchasing my app. And it’s a helpful tool to see if sudden spikes in new trials or cancellations are happening.

Experiments

One of the most powerful new features now available on all of the new plans are RevenueCat Experiments. Our A/B testing tool is tailored specifically for optimizing your in-app purchases by allowing you to compare the outcome of changes across the entire customer journey. 

This means, for example, you can see how a change to product pricing impacts not just the number of customers who tap to start a trial, but also how many of those users cancel, and what the actual lifetime value per customer is.

Everything with experiments is powered by our offerings model. The system works by automatically allocating your users between two different offerings, and then measuring the difference in customer journey between those two offerings. This means anything that’s associated with an offering such as the aforementioned Paywalls or Offering Metadata can be A/B tested with our RevenueCat Experiments.

If you’ve just gotten access to experiments and are looking for something to try, I would recommend testing a change to when you show your paywall. If you’re not already showing your paywall automatically on your app launch, why don’t you give it a shot?

You can add an Offering Metadata field called “showOnFirstLaunch” and set it to “false” on one offering, and “true” on the other. Then check that field in your app on launch and show the paywall if it’s set to true.

Experiments are an extremely powerful way to optimize your business. Now that you have access, give them a try!

Paywalls

The brand new RevenueCat Paywalls beta is included on all of the new plans! There’s a lot going on here, but to get started, I would consider migrating your existing paywall to use our paywall footer view. These footer views contain almost all of the difficult technical parts of your paywall. 

RevenueCat will handle all of the StoreKit and payment code, showing the correct copy based on the users trial eligibility, and dynamically showing all of the right products and pricing that you can configure remotely through our dashboard. You can still use your custom paywall marketing view behind the card, so the change will be pretty minimal, but you’ll be able to remove a lot of complexity from your code.

You could also switch to one of our full Paywall Templates. These are highly customizable paywalls built by RevenueCat following industry best practices. All of the configuration can be done from our RevenueCat dashboard, which means you can make changes without changing code or waiting for App Review.

With either of these options, you’ll be able to test and optimize your paywalls with another RevenueCat feature now included in all of the new plans… Experiments.

Wrap Up

Here at RevenueCat our goal is to help developers make more money. Enabling them for our new plans means everyone has the ability to utilize them to grow their business. Hopefully this quick guide gives you a few ideas on easy wins you can try out with your apps!