Top all-time · #2130
RevenueCat
Company blog · revenuecat.com/blogbusinessprogrammingstartups
RevenueCat is the company blog at revenuecat.com, writing about business, programming and startups. Since 2017, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 54 times, most often “Most Subscription-Based Apps Do Not Make Money”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link RevenueCat for its state-of-subscription-apps data reports, its engineering and developer-relations blog posts, and its API for in-app subscriptions across iOS and Android.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The world’s best apps use RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customer data, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web.
Most-linked posts?
- /4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-06-16
- Most Subscription-Based Apps Do Not Make Money4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-03-13
- Apple opened the door to web paywalls – our test shows it might hurt conversions3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-05-14
- Subscription apps benchmark drop by RevenueCat2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-18
- Lessons Learned Replicating a PostgreSQL Cluster to Redshift with AWS DMS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-07-21
What Hacker News says?
I think OP was talking about Revenue Cat: https://www.revenuecat.com
Comment linking /
on “Court issues permanent injunction in Epic vs. Apple case”Submitted The Case for Location-Independent Salaries as a story · 29 points
HN discussionReact Native apps make more revenue than Flutter and Native apps according to Revenue Cat report published on June 3rd, 2026. https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/engineering/why-react-native...
Comment linking /blog/engineering/why-react-native-apps-make-more-money
on “Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin”Submitted How we migrated our database to Amazon Aurora with zero downtime as a story · 20 points
HN discussionRevenueCat | various roles | Remote | Full-time | https://www.revenuecat.com RevenueCat is an API that makes it easy to sell subscriptions in your mobile app. We launched as part of Y Combinator's summer 2018 batch and today are handling subscriptions for more than 5 million mobile subscribers, and are the subscription infrastructure for thousands of apps. We believe that a direct, consumer relationship between deve…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2021)”Submitted Ensure public interface reliability: Tracking API compatibility for Android as a story · 9 points
HN discussionNot necessarily. For starters, small companies are paying 15%, not 30%. I'm also not sure where a small company can find a payment processor that will only charge 1%. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. If you have a $4.99 in-app purchase that will cost you 44 cents per transaction to use Stripe vs 75 cents to use Apple's IAP. But Stripe does not act as a merchant of record so you are responsible for…
Comment linking /blog/growth/iap-vs-web-purchases-conversion-test/
on “Epic celebrates "the end of the Apple Tax" after court win in iOS payments case”Submitted What to Get Right When Doing Mobile Subscriptions as a story · 9 points
HN discussionRevenueCat | Remote | https://www.revenuecat.com We're looking for a Frontend Engineer and an Engineering Project Manager to help us help developers make more money. https://jobs.lever.co/revenuecat
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2020)”Submitted Release Trains: How we automate the releases of SDKs as a story · 7 points
HN discussionBasically a transaction receipt is all the app gets. It’s up to the app developer to associate this purchase transaction with any app related user identity information. RevenueCat had a decent explanation for this considering this is their main product: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/managing-cross-platform-subs... Disclaimer: not at all associated with revenuecat, just in the process of evaluating their product my…
Comment linking /blog/managing-cross-platform-subscriptions
on “Apple buying Google ads for high-value subscription apps”Submitted Post Mortem: App Store Outage on January 24th, 2020 as a story · 7 points
HN discussionHaving built a cross-platform app recently as a very small team, I want to put in a plug for RevenueCat ( https://www.revenuecat.com/ ). They abstract away the differences between the Apple/Google APIs so you don't have to worry about dealing with both. You only interface with Revcat. They don't support every last Play Store/App Store API, but I haven't yet found that be an issue. Worth noting that our app uses subs…
Comment linking /
on “Google requiring Android apps on Play store to use its billing system next year”Submitted Apple opened the door to web paywalls – our test shows it might hurt conversions as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttps://www.revenuecat.com (YC S18) API to manage In app subscriptions. I think it qualifies since it’s free up to 10K$ MTR. Disclaimer: I work at RevenueCat, not in the mobile side of things although if I were to start a mobile app with subscriptions, after seeing how painful is to get it right, I for sure would use them.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are your go to SaaS products for startups/MVPs?”Submitted Lessons Learned Replicating a PostgreSQL Cluster to Redshift with AWS DMS as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThis is good advice! I would like to propose a corollary: If your main API function has multiple parameters, in the documentation example you need to use all of them, and absolutely do not shadow the parameter names! “foo foo = foo” might make your demo look slick, but the developer learns nothing. This is a lost opportunity to explain the parameters with the variable name instead of a comment. I’ll give an example:…
Comment linking /docs/getting-started/quickstart
on “Unlocking the 'aha' moment: Developer relations for startups”Submitted Migrating to PgBouncer on ECS at Scale as a story · 6 points
HN discussionHere’s a direct PDF link: https://www.revenuecat.com/pdf/state-of-subscription-apps-20...
Comment linking /pdf/state-of-subscription-apps-2024.pdf
on “Only 3.5% of all mobile apps reach $10k monthly”Submitted SKAdNetwork and iOS 14 Privacy Changes as a story · 6 points
HN discussionAlthough the Apple Insider article notes that you have to provide an email, the full article [1] actually has quite a bit of additional info. Some pretty interesting, and rather sobering. Gaming is such dice throw (appropriately). It has the fastest subscriber growth, yet tops out worse than almost every other category, and has horrible 14 day, 60 day, and yearly average money. Only travel, productivity, and shoppin…
Comment linking /state-of-subscription-apps-2024/
on “Only 3.5% of all mobile apps reach $10k monthly”Submitted Subscription apps benchmark drop by RevenueCat as a story · 5 points
HN discussionNo. This section of the full report[1] shows it is 3.5% of all subscription apps. See the chart for a clearer visual. [1] https://www.revenuecat.com/state-of-subscription-apps-2024/#...
Comment linking /state-of-subscription-apps-2024/
on “Just 17.2% of apps ever pass $1k/mo. Of those ~35% hit $5k/mo. 3.5% hit $10k/mo”Submitted Price Testing for Subscription Apps as a story · 5 points
HN discussionRevenueCat is by far the leader in the segment, while having about the same pricing as the competitors. https://revenuecat.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are you using for IAP subscription management?”Submitted Apple's new subscription management prompt seems to be working as a story · 5 points
HN discussionDo you have evidence for that claim? My understanding is that Apple takes their cut after any refunds have been settled[1], and the same appears to be true for Steam[2]. 1: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/does-apple-keep-its-c... 2: https://www.techradar.com/news/how-steam-refunds-are-a-bless...
Comment linking /blog/growth/does-apple-keep-its-commission/
on “The Death of Unity”Submitted We solved RevenueCat's biggest challenges on data ingestion into Snowflake as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI make Hazumi News for iOS, a Hacker News reader (Free download + subscriptions) - Free to download (did try €1 but didn't work well) My goal is to get as many users into the funnel, show them a good app for free, offer subscriptions for more features. - I have a €1 per month subscription for backend functionality (push notifications and bookmarking with iCloud syncing) - My subscription strategy is release shiny ne…
Comment linking /state-of-subscription-apps-2024/
on “Ask HN: How are you monetizing your mobile apps?”Submitted RevenueCat's data-caching techniques for 1.2B daily API requests as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
