Been going back and forth on this for weeks. Our dev team keeps saying they can build subscription handling in-house but honestly the complexity scares me.
What was the specific feature or benefit that made you pull the trigger on paying for one of these services instead of rolling your own?
Cross-platform receipt validation saved us weeks of dev work. Apple and Google handle receipts completely differently, and the edge cases around network failures, expired certificates, and fraudulent receipts are absolute hell.
We got burned by users sharing fake purchase screenshots before switching. RevenueCat handles all validation server-side, so you know your revenue data’s legit.
This breakdown of subscription analytics helped a ton when we were comparing platforms:
The webhook reliability alone paid for itself. At $50k+ monthly, losing even 1% of transactions to failed webhooks really hurts.
Promo code handling. Apple makes it needlessly complicated.
Adapty’s grace period handling won me over. We were losing users who actually wanted to keep their subscriptions just because their cards expired and payments failed.
Building that yourself? You’re stuck dealing with App Store and Google Play retry policies, dunning management, plus all those weird edge cases. Adapty handles it automatically.
Saved us 2-3 months of dev work and stopped hemorrhaging revenue from involuntary churn.
Customer support integration was a game changer. Users can check their subscription status right in the app instead of contacting support.
Dungeon defense for subscription status. Users delete apps, reinstall months later, and expect their premium features back. Building restore logic that works across devices and handles Apple Family Sharing or Google Play Pass is a nightmare. RevenueCat’s restore flow just works. User taps restore, enters their email or Apple ID, boom - premium unlocked. No support tickets about lost purchases eating into your margins.
RevenueCat’s charts and analytics made the decision easy for me. Tracking LTV and churn manually takes a lot of time.
Your developers can handle basic subscriptions, but the edge cases can be tough. Different app stores, failed payments, and webhook issues can take months of development time.
Server outages killed our homegrown system twice last month.
Receipt validation on iOS and Android is hard to do right. You have to deal with Apple’s and Google’s ever-changing validation endpoints. Plus, there are edge cases like refunds and family sharing. If you mess up one update, it can block paying customers or allow fraud. These services take care of that and give you clean webhooks when subscription changes happen. The time your developers save from not having to debug these issues will pay for the service.