Widgetsmith

The Challenge

A sudden surge of hundreds of new users per second 

With over a decade of experience as an indie developer, David is no stranger to monetizing iOS apps. In the past, he’s used Apple’s APIs to enable in-app purchases for his apps. But when he decided to switch to a subscription model, he knew it would take weeks to code it himself. So he decided to use RevenueCat to manage his app subscriptions.

Then David launched Widgetsmith on the App Store, and was faced with every indie developer’s dream scenario: the app rocketed to #1 in the US App Store and stayed there for two weeks straight. 

David was suddenly dealing with hundreds of new users per second, and tens of millions of app downloads. Thankfully, RevenueCat was there to scale with him.

“Widgetsmith took off in a way I didn’t expect…I suddenly found myself with tens of millions of downloads in a very short period. I don’t think any solution I could have built would have been able to keep up with that and scale for that many users so quickly.”

The Solution

A mobile app subscription platform that scales seamlessly

As Widgetsmith unexpectedly amassed tens of millions of downloads and climbed to #1 in the Apple Store, hundreds of new users were subscribing per second.

RevenueCat handled the influx of subscriptions flawlessly, leaving David free to focus on his core product. 

Even as downloads exploded, he didn’t receive a single customer complaint about payment processing issues. And the RevenueCat team checked in with him regularly to make sure things kept running smoothly.

“My homegrown solution would have not been able to scale as quickly or as cleanly as their system did. At some point it would have failed, and I wouldn’t have been able to take new subscribers. I would have had to stop until I could get it fixed —  and I would have lost revenue as a result. I wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of this unique opportunity if I didn’t have RevenueCat’s ability to scale behind me.”

The Result

Millions of downloads, zero downtime

Widgetsmith has stayed in the App Store Top 20 since it launched. Because of RevenueCat, David has been able to handle the steady influx of new users — and capture the revenue from all of those subscriptions — without any issues. 

In David’s mind, RevenueCat has more than paid for itself. Not only did he save weeks of time and effort setting up subscriptions for his app, partnering with RevenueCat also gave him peace of mind as his user base grew exponentially.

“The best thing I can say for RevenueCat is that I don’t think about it. It’s always worked. It’s never had a problem. I’ve never had to keep an eye on it or worry about it. At any level of scale, it just works. And they’re taking care of all the hard stuff behind the scenes to make that happen.”