RevenueCat, a startup offering a range of tools for subscription-based app developers, has raised $ 40 million in Series B funds and valued its business at $ 300 million after the money. RevenueCat’s software development kit (SDK) solution was created by developers who understood firsthand the difficulties of scaling a subscription app. It gives companies the tools they need to build a subscription business. That includes not only adding subscriptions themselves, but keeping them over time as the app stores are implementing changes. It also helps by sharing subscription data with other tools the company uses, such as: B. for advertising, analysis or attribution.
The funding round was led by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund and included participation from Index Ventures, SaaStr, Oakhouse, Adjacent and FundersClub, as well as CTO Tobias Balling, CTO of Blinklist, and Nicolas Dessaign, CEO of Algolia. With the round of YC Continuity Partner Anu Hariharan joins the board of directors of RevenueCat, which today includes the founders and Mark Fiorentino of Index.
Explains the CEO of RevenueCat Jacob EitingThe idea for the company came about after he and co-founder Miguel Carranza Guisado (CTO) struggled figuring out the subscription infrastructure while working together at Elevate. After years of unraveling a “subscription mess” trying to find answers to basic questions like subscriber retention and lifetime value, they realized that there was potential for other developers to solve this problem.
According to Eiting, Apple and Google aren’t always up to date on what companies actually need to build subscription businesses. “They learn as they go. They just couldn’t give us the data we needed, and then the infrastructure for that isn’t trivial either. “
Credit: RevenueCat
When Eiting and Guisado got together to work on RevenueCat in 2017, no one was building anything like it. However, demand for the startup’s tools and integrations soon caught on from developers facing similar challenges as the growing subsection app market.
The service gives developers access to a real-time dashboard that shows key metrics such as subscription income, churn, LTV (Lifetime value), subscriber numbers, conversions and more. The data can then be shared through integration with other tools and services such as Customize, Amplitude, Apple Search Ads, AppsFlyer, Branch, Facebook Ads, Google Cloud Intercom, Mixpanel, Segment. and several others.
After launching Y Combinator’s accelerator the following year, RevenueCat was soon live with 100 apps and had tracked revenue exceeding $ 1 million by the time it kicked off its $ 1.5 million launch.
Today RevenueCat has over 6,000 apps live on its platform, with over $ 1 billion in tracked subscription revenue being managed by its tools. That’s twice as many apps that used their service starting from his $ 15 million Series A last August.
With the additional funding, the company will lower its prices to make its tools more accessible to more developers. Previously, the company was charging $ 120 per month for its diagrams and some of its integrations, or $ 499 per month for access to all of its integrations. This was affordable for larger companies, but could still be a tough sell for app developers whose sales were between $ 10,000 and $ 50,000 per month.
Now RevenueCat charges a small percentage of an app’s revenue instead of a flat fee. Developers with monthly Tracked Revenue (MTR) of up to $ 10,000 can get started with the service for free, and as their needs increase – e.g. B. Access to diagrams, support for web hooks, integrations and others – you can Switch to either the Starter or Pro plans as USD 8 / month or USD 12 / month per USD 1,000 in MTR.
“I’m very excited to be making these tools available to developers, especially on the small scale, as this may be what they need to get out of this $ 10,000 space,” said Eiting. “The nice thing about freemium, or a really generous free tier, is also that it makes your tool de facto – you remove as much friction as possible for providing software services and then setting your prices right – which I think we have – everything pays off, ”he adds.
The company also plans to use the new funds to further invest in its business and to add the Amazon Appstore to its App Store and Google Play support. It will also expand its team.
As part of anticipated growth, RevenueCat recently hired a product manager. Jens-Fabian Goetzmann, previously PM at Microsoft and then Product Manager at Fitness App 8fit. Currently 30 employees, in the coming year RevenueCat will grow to 60 employees, attitude about design, product, engineering, sales and other roles.
“The world is moving towards subscriptions – and for companies, expanding this model means weeks of development time,” says Hariharan of YC Continuity. “RevenueCat helps developers get subscriptions up and running in minutes and creates a source of truth for customer data. It is important for developers creating solutions to problems in the world to find ways to monetize, grow, and support their most dedicated customers. RevenueCat creates Subscriptions 2.0 for this. “