Introducing RevenueCat Web Billing: Web subscriptions for mobile apps, simplified

At RevenueCat, our mission is to help developers make more money. 

To do that, we’ve focused on making in-app subscriptions as easy as possible. However, web subscriptions also offer a wealth of opportunities for mobile developers, like faster experimentation, better measurability, and favorable margins. 

To help mobile developers capture this opportunity, we’re excited to launch RevenueCat Web Billing: web purchases designed to work seamlessly with your mobile app.

In this blog, we’ll dive deeper into what we’re launching, why you should check it out, and what’s on the horizon.

What is RevenueCat Web Billing?

RevenueCat Web Billing is a JavaScript SDK and web backend that allows you to integrate subscription purchases into your website that unlock entitlements for mobile. Web subscriptions work seamlessly with the existing RevenueCat backend for mobile applications to make managing user access to entitlements easy. Here’s a breakdown of the core components and what’s planned for the future.

Core components 

• Billing Engine: At the heart of RevenueCat Web Billing is our billing engine, designed to manage recurring billing, invoice creation, and handle billing issues.
• Web SDK:The RC Billing engine also connects to our Web SDK which checks entitlements, offerings and manages the purchase flow. The Web SDK is designed with the same interfaces as the mobile SDKs, making it simple to launch web subscriptions for mobile app developers
• Customer portal: We’ve built a customer portal that doesn’t require any coding from your end. Subscribers can manage their subscriptions and billing information directly, reducing the support queries and improving the overall customer experience.
• Integration with the RevenueCat ecosystem: RevenueCat Web Billing extends beyond just handling payments — it plugs into the entire RevenueCat ecosystem, including Charts, Customer Profiles, Events, and Data Exports. This integration ensures that all the tools you rely on for subscription management and analytics work with Web Billing.
• Stripe Payment Gateway: Presently, Stripe will be the payment gateway used to process transactions. 
• Web Paywall Links for RevenueCat Web Billing make getting started with web purchases easy by eliminating the need to build and host your own web checkout flow. You set them up in the RevenueCat dashboard, and RevenueCat hosts a paywall UI and gives you a link you can send to your users where they can purchase your products to unlock features across the web and your mobile apps. RevenueCat handles the entire UI from paywall, to purchase, to email invoices, and subscription management users can open from those invoices.
• Redemption Links make it easy to link web purchases with in-app entitlements. Users can complete a purchase on a web paywall without needing to log in. After checkout, they receive a unique redemption link (on the post-purchase landing page and via email) that deep-links into your app, automatically associating the purchase.
• [Not yet supported] Web Paywall SDK: Just as RevenueCat Paywalls make monetization simple for mobile, we plan to eventually offer fully configurable web paywalls.
• [Not yet supported] Other payment gateways: In the future, we may explore supporting more gateways in addition to Stripe. 

Why launch Web Billing?

For mobile apps, offering web subscriptions represents a major opportunity to drive growth and profitability. Web Billing seeks to make it as simple as possible for developers to make more money via the web by offering a solution designed with mobile business-to-consumer app use cases in mind. 

To unlock growth from web purchases  

• Favorable margins: Eligible web purchases aren’t subject to Apple’s and Google’s fees, potentially increasing your profit margins significantly. The fees for web purchases through RevenueCat Web Billing are just your usual RevenueCat fee (ie. 1% for Pro users earning $2,500+ in MTR) and Stripe’s standard 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fee. (Stripe fee may vary based on location)
• Accurate measurement: Web purchases allow the passing of URL parameters that can enable more precise attribution. This can make web payments a valuable channel to test and learn what drives conversion and growth for your mobile app. 
• Improved customer communications: Since the web purchase channel is owned by you, you’re able to directly communicate with your users and own the end-to-end experience. Web payments can be a great tool for email lifecycle marketing, like win-back campaigns.
• Flexible pricing strategies: Since you control the web checkout process, you also have full ability to customize pricing, packaging, and discounting beyond what is available for in-app purchases.
• Affiliate programs: Easily manage affiliate and referral programs, a task that’s challenging on mobile platforms.

To cater to mobile-first needs 

• Seamless cross-platform user experience: Web Billing ensures a consistent subscription experience across web and mobile, simplifying access and management of entitlements.
• Unified developer experience across platforms: the Web SDK is designed with the same interfaces as the mobile SDKs. You can manage your cross-platform product catalog and entitlements all in RevenueCat
• Pricing & packaging tailored to mobile: Web Billing seeks to focus on the pricing models and features that are most relevant to mobile B2C apps, trimming the excess offerings associated with web-first billing solutions. We have plans to release features like cross-platform bundling, bulk purchasing and personalized offers.
• A complete monetization partner: RevenueCat becomes your single source of truth for all things monetization, offering a suite of tools designed to help you grow your app business — across platforms. 

What about the Stripe Billing integration?

We want to reassure you that RevenueCat’s integration with Stripe Billing remains a key part of our ecosystem. This long-standing integration enables you to manage subscriptions on your website using Stripe, seamlessly unlocking access in your app via the Purchases SDK.

RevenueCat Web Billing is crafted with the mobile-first developer in mind, simplifying the extension of mobile app subscriptions to the web with minimal lift. For those apps with a Stripe web checkout already in place or who are looking to utilize Stripe’s broad range of use cases alongside RevenueCat for mobile, the Stripe integration remains an ideal option.

What’s to come for Web Billing

We’re just getting started with Web Billing, and our product team is hard at work on even more capabilities to help make integrated web purchases easy.

• Tax handling: Sales tax or VAT support is coming soon.
• Pricing, packaging, and discounting flexibility: We’re working towards offering developers the full ability to customize pricing, packaging and discounting beyond what is available for in-app purchases including referral programs, gift subscriptions, cross-platform offers, and bulk purchasing.
• Cross-app bundling and personalization: Future update to Web Billing will enable you to offer bundles of apps and personalized pricing packages more easily on the web.
• Gift cards and bulk subscriptions: Future releases will allow for separating the buyer and customer roles, opening up new marketing and sales opportunities.
• Multiple payment gateways: Presently, Stripe is the only payment gateway offered. To support more local payment methods, we may integrate additional payment gateways in the future.
• Web paywall SDK: While Web Paywall Links make it easy for you to create and share a hosted web checkout UI, customization options remain limited today. We’re planning to build out our web paywall tools to include templates and customization, much like RevenueCat Paywalls for mobile.

Get started and share your feedback

RevenueCat Web Billing streamlines web subscriptions for mobile apps, allowing you to take advantage of the many benefits the web can bring to your monetization strategy.

Web Billing is available to users on our Pro, Scale and Enterprise plans. Purchases through Web Billing are subject to your usual RevenueCat fee (ie. 1% for Pro users earning $2,500+ in MTR) and Stripe’s standard transaction fee. Check out the docs for more info.

We’re eager for you to start exploring and to hear your feedback! To share your feedback, join our Discord.