Meet the Web Purchase button (why and where you should test it, today)
Link out to web purchases from your iOS app paywall.
Tonight’s Epic v. Apple injunction gives U.S. iOS apps the green light to point customers to the web for checkout. We just shipped a tiny‑but‑mighty addition to RevenueCat Paywalls that makes it trivial.
Want to see the web purchase button demoed, live? Join our next office hours on Friday, May 2 – 7pm (CET), and we’ll walk through this new addition to the platform, along with our ‘regular scheduled programming’. Sign up here – Want to read more about the injunction and its implications? We gathered everything you need to know in a blogpost here
What’s new
Within hours after the news broke, our team shipped a Web Purchase Button. A new component you can drop into any RevenueCat paywall to whisk users over to a RevenueCat-hosted web checkout, complete the purchase, and then unlock access in-app as if it were a native buy flow.
This hosted web checkout is powered by RevenueCat’s Web Billing feature. We handle everything including web paywall design, invoicing, and a subscription management user interface. It’s the all-in-one foundation that makes it possible to launch a polished, fully hosted paywall on the web—without having to build or manage the billing stack yourself. If you’ve enabled Web Billing, you’re already set up to use these new paywall buttons. If not, check out the docs to get started.
Should you use a web purchase button?
Maybe! External payments are brand‑new territory, and we don’t yet know how Apple (or your conversion rate) will react. That’s why we built the feature to play hand‑in‑hand with Experiments:
- Variant A – Paywall with a Web Purchase Button → web checkout
- Variant B – Classic paywall with in‑app purchases
Go live in minutes, watch the data roll in, and double‑down on whatever wins. Slice results by platform, country, etc – you know the drill.
Who can flip the switch today?
- iOS users physically located in the United States
- Apps running the latest RevenueCat iOS SDK
- Teams happy to live on the cutting edge of policy changes
Use Targeting to limit this paywall to iOS users in the United States using a supported version of the SDK:
What’s next
We’re tracking (and iterating on) Apple’s response in real time. A deeper dive on the ruling – and what it means for subscription apps – is coming soon on the blog. Stay tuned! 🚀
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