Skip to content
YC Root AccessYC Root Access

RevenueCat: Powering Subscriptions for the App Economy

RevenueCat is the subscription infrastructure powering the app economy — handling in-app purchases, entitlements, and analytics for millions of apps. By solving one of the hardest problems in mobile development, it's become the default platform for developers who want to monetize with subscriptions. In this sit-down with YC Partner Gustaf Alstromer, co-founders Jacob Eiting and Miguel Carranza share how frustration with Apple’s in-app purchase system led them to start RevenueCat, the pivotal decisions that helped them scale from YC to a global platform, and the lessons they’ve learned building the backbone of mobile monetization. Learn more about RevenueCat: https://www.revenuecat.com Chapters: 00:00 – What RevenueCat Does 00:40 – The Pain of Building In-App Purchases 02:10 – From Developer Frustration to Startup Idea 03:30 – YC and Early Product Decisions 05:00 – Building for Developers First 07:00 – Scaling to Millions of Apps 09:20 – Lessons on Pricing and Business Model 12:00 – Growing the Team 14:00 – Competing with Incumbents and Big Platforms 17:00 – Staying Close to Customers as You Scale 20:00 – The Future of Subscription Infrastructure 23:00 – Advice for Founders

Gustaf AlstromerhostJacob EitingguestMiguel Carranzaguest
Sep 30, 202526mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

RevenueCat simplifies in-app subscriptions, scaling via developer-led adoption and trust

  1. RevenueCat was founded to remove the heavy engineering burden of implementing and maintaining cross-platform in-app purchases and subscriptions for small mobile teams.
  2. The founders’ firsthand pain building subscription systems repeatedly let them design a standardized “RevenueCat way” and earn early customer trust quickly.
  3. Early growth came from ultra-high-touch integrations, YC-driven social proof, and a developer-led “pull” motion rather than traditional sales-led SaaS tactics.
  4. Signals of product–market fit included accelerating inbound adoption, servers/bandwidth breaking under load, and customers demanding more features than the team could build.
  5. As the company scaled to ~100+ people and remote-first operations, they emphasized transparency, disciplined metric reporting, and continuous customer closeness to navigate platform risk and long-term execution.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Solve the undifferentiated pain that steals engineering cycles.

RevenueCat exists because small teams were spending “half of engineering” on monetization plumbing instead of core product; building an abstraction layer converts repeated bespoke work into shared infrastructure.

Developer trust comes from lived experience and strong opinions.

Because the founders had “lived that suffering,” early customer conversations were easier and they could credibly prescribe a standard approach to subscriptions and data rather than offering vague consulting.

For dev tools, don’t start with traditional sales—optimize for self-serve adoption.

They argue developers “don’t want to talk to sales”; the efficient motion is to answer technical questions, make onboarding trivial, and let developers pull the product into their app.

The long tail of indie developers can be a growth engine, not a distraction.

Indies try tools early, create word-of-mouth and content, and later carry preferences into bigger companies—creating a compounding distribution channel.

Early-stage traction may require extreme, unscalable helpfulness.

RevenueCat’s founders did integrations on-site, fixed unrelated bugs (“extra fries in the bag”), and even offered “1% of revenue in perpetuity” deals to get initial footholds and proof.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

“In-app purchases are hard.”

— Jacob Eiting

“Probably half of our engineering efforts were just around monetization.”

— Jacob Eiting

“Don’t do sales.”

— Jacob Eiting

“Always follow every RevenueCat customer… it just fills my feed with customers.”

— Jacob Eiting

“It’s a marriage without the good parts.”

— Miguel Carranza

Cross-platform in-app purchase complexitySubscription analytics, paywalls, and experimentationEarly customer acquisition via high-touch integrationsDeveloper GTM: product-led pull vs sales pushYC’s impact: social proof and ambition-settingProduct–market fit signals and scaling painsRemote-first culture, hiring, and transparencyPlatform risk: Apple/Google, Epic lawsuit changesFounder psychology: persistence, culture, and co-founder dynamics

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

Add to Chrome