How RevenueCat Helped Spark Networks Rebuild Their Apps for the Future of Mobile Dating

When Spark Networks, parent company of top apps like EliteSingles, Silver Singles, needed to rebuild their apps and subscription payments infrastructure from the ground up, they turned to RevenueCat. RevenueCat’s ease of use, robust features, and helpful developer experience enabled SparkNetworks to focus on building features to connect people— while RevenueCat took care of everything else.

The problem: SparkNetworks needed subscription infrastructure they could trust 

Spark Networks is a dating app company that’s been in the online dating business for nearly 30 years. Their portfolio of dating apps including Zoosk, ChristianMingle, JDate, earns $100M annual recurring revenue from subscriptions and digital currency.

Having been around since 1997, Spark Networks had historically focused primarily on web apps. However, CTO Tobias Plaputta, noticed the rapid acceleration in mobile engagement and the need for Spark Networks to step up their game in the mobile space. 

But there was a problem: their current app and subscription infrastructure were simply not ready to handle the type of mobile growth they were seeing. “One of our main challenges was tracking renewals, chargebacks, and refunds,” Tobias said. “This was partly due to transparency issues with Apple, but also because we never had a dedicated internal billing team — it was always a side project for other teams. To make matters worse, Apple regularly changes how payment receipts and API responses look. We constantly had to pull focus from ongoing projects to meet Apple’s deadlines. As a result, we were never 100% certain that we had a proper recording of our mobile revenue.”

These challenges led Tobias and his team to make the tough but necessary decision to rebuild several of their apps (EliteSingles, SilverSingles, and eDarling) from the ground up. If it went well, they would then rebuild the rest of their apps (like Zoosk, Christian Mingle, LDS Singles, and Jdate).

Early in the process, Tobias realized that the effort to rebuild their app and payments infrastructure in-house was going to be costly and painful.

“I realized that it seemed unreasonable to invest the budget or capacity to have a dedicated billing team that only focuses on this all the time. I wanted to see if there was a solution out there that could handle it all for us instead,” he said.

So they began researching third-party providers of in-app payments infrastructure. “We looked at Qonversion, Adapty, AppHud, and RevenueCat,” said Gabriel Asandei, an engineering lead at Spark Networks. “We scored each option based on their product maturity, key features, and available integrations. Other important factors for us were pricing and the developer experience. We wanted to make sure we could get our team up and running with the solution as soon as possible.”

The Solution: RevenueCat’s “exceptional developer experience” made Spark Networks’ rebuild possible

Spark Networks decided to work with RevenueCat based on the ease of implementation, quality of integrations, and the support they received from the RevenueCat team. “The developer experience really stood out,” Gabriel said.

“RevenueCat’s documentation is extremely thorough, which allowed us to create a proof of concept within a couple of days. Not only was the content of the documentation high-quality, but how it was presented, and the thought behind it, was in line with our way of working. Just looking at the documentation gave me the confidence that the RevenueCat team knew what they were doing.”

In addition to providing great documentation, the RevenueCat team supported Spark Networks every step of the way — making a seemingly onerous project feel manageable.

“The customer success experience was excellent from day one. Our account executive Dylan was absolutely top notch. I was also able to discuss my team’s needs at length with RevenueCat’s Head of Product. This all gave me a lot of confidence in the RevenueCat team as a whole.”

In the end, Spark Networks was able to launch new future-proof versions of EliteSingles, SilverSingles, and eDarling on time, and they credit RevenueCat with their success.

“RevenueCat was a key factor in the success of this project. We couldn’t have completed this project on time if it weren’t for RevenueCat and their amazing documentation.”

The Future: Unlocking more growth with RevenueCat

Now that their first cohort of rebuilt apps has been launched, Spark Networks is looking forward to rebuilding their next batch of apps — including top brands like Christian Mingle and Jdate — with RevenueCat in 2024. And they’re excited to leverage RevenueCat’s suit of growth tools and integrations to optimize their marketing efforts.

“We’re looking forward to exploring RevenueCat’s paywall tools. Any time an expert third party like RevenueCat can manage complexity, we’re interested. We’re also exploring Targeting and Experiments. Apple makes it difficult to add multiple prices and experiments. With RevenueCat, we can create specific audiences for specials, coupons, and reduced prices, and we can manage all of them through RevenueCat.”