Setting up a RevenueCat Paywall in my app

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the p w podcast. I'm your host as always, Peter Witham. You can find me and this podcast at peterwitham.com. This week, I have been working on my paywall for my new app, Subradar.

Now, I have never had to make a paywall before, believe it or not. And so I trusted in my fellow developers who recommended and used RevenueCat, and I was like, okay, let's do this. I'm gonna follow along here and knowing that they use it gives me a sense of, oh great, the community can help me if I hit problems. Well, so I went in and first of all, set up the account. You go to revenuecat.com.

This is not an advertisement for them, but if they want to sponsor me, hey, go for it. Just reach out to me. But it was very straightforward, very simple. You go through, you answer some questions, you create a product, which is basically what you're going to have in your app, and then you set up the look of the payroll screen, and it's got a visual designer, they've got a bunch of really cool templates, and all of that part, super easy. At the end of it, you've got a little chunk of code, and you have an API key as it were.

Now what you do is you go over into in my case, you go into Xcode, but RevenueCat seems to work with just about every platform I could think of and game engine. And this was interesting and worthy of note for the future as well. So I went in, and the tricky part with Apple here is you still have to set something up in the Apple developer portal. However, the good news is RevenueCat walks you through it. Their documentation and their onboarding is just simply fantastic.

I followed their instructions. I went into the Apple portal. I set up my product, which basically is the same as what I set up in RevenueCat, except this one has all the financial details and things like that. In my case, I wanted to set up and build a yearly subscription. You go through and you can set up a subscription, and you say, hey, it's gonna be x amount, and it's a weekly, monthly, yearly, whatever.

Right? And once you've got that set up, you get a code that you then are gonna use. Again, you're gonna basically link RevenueCat to your app via an SDK, and you're also gonna link RevenueCat to the portal, the Apple portal. I went through and did all of that, and again, worked great. There was a few things I did wrong as far as setting up the product because and the subscription because I basically this was I just didn't know what I was doing, and I hit the wrong thing.

I ended up with the wrong pricing and kind of this my yearly pricing was the monthly, and then, of course, the yearly was way higher. But was able to fix it. All of this happens, I should stress, on the development side. So you don't have to worry like, oh my god, what's happening in production? Because the answer is nothing.

This has not been published to production. So once you've done all that, you go back into Xcode, and I set up a little bit of code. I basically bring in the RevenueCat SDK and the UI SDK for that, and then I just hook in a link. So in my case, I got a button, which is, in this case, GoPro. Right?

So you subscribe to get the professional version, and then I just call a function that pops up RevenueCat's payroll that we had just designed. Beautiful. Fantastic. Simple. And you can test all of this within the simulator or your application via Xcode.

And the way you do that is you can pull down a config file. It's a config file for basically StoreKit, and it gives you access to the development version of this to see what it looks like. Use RevenueCat, a lot of debugging in the console to say, look, this worked correctly. This didn't work. I've just shown you the payroll worked and so on.

So it's all there and all very readable. You just I would say, just take your time. And if even better, if you get stuck, go look at the RevenueCat documentation. So I got all of that set up, and that was great. I had a few little hiccups.

Again, shout out to the community on DevClub. They helped me out there, especially CocoType. And once that's all set up, it's like, great. Tested it. Everything's wonderful.

Now that I've done that, I now need to set in to basically in the plug into the application what things sit behind that paywall. So let me give you an example. You'll have seen these if you've ever used an application, particularly a mobile application. Right? There will be limitations, shall we say, in an app, And you sign up, get the paywall, or unlock the feature, and now you've got access to it, right?

And you don't have to track any of this. The Apple portal tracks this, RevenueCat tracks this. All you've got to do is figure out what it is. So, basically, I went in and just added some very simple if blocks, which went along the lines of if the user is subscribed, do this. Right?

In my case, show the search bar in the interface, show the button to do advanced sorting on the list. And most importantly, in the free version, you can only add three listed items. So I basically had to go in and put some little logic in there that said, alright. I don't wanna destroy the user's data because there's a user scenario where they were a pro user with subscription expired, and maybe they're gonna renew it. The bad thing to do and the thing you should never do is delete their data.

Right? So I just prevent them from getting to that and only showing them three items on the list. Now there's some interesting little loopholes to walk around there because if I had allowed them to sort them or use the search bar, they could basically still find any of the infinite number of listed items they put in there. So that's why I hit the search bar, changed the sorting, and basically had the code say, show me the three earliest entries they had added. Right?

And that's the limitation. Now, again, all their data is protected in the background. They don't have to worry about losing it. If they resubscribe, boom. They've got their full list of whatever length of subscriptions it may be.

50, a 110, whatever. Right? They're gonna see them all again. And I stress that's an important thing for you to consider as a developer when you do this. So I put all of that in place.

And then finally, on the button to add a new item, I also put that on there that said, if they are not a professional user, then if they have reached their three limit, pop up the paywall and say, hey. To add new ones, you need to be subscribed, right, to the subscription. And if it's anything other than that, less than three and so on, just allow them to add another subscription till they get to three. Simple as that. These are all things you must consider and think about, because they won't be immediately obvious if you're not used to building applications with these kind of paywalls and unlocks and features and all those kind of things.

So just wanna put that out there, just give you something to think about. It is not as hard as you may think it is. However, I will say I still find it incredibly stressful because we're talking about money, and folks don't have a lot of money out there sometimes. Right? And I want it to be right.

I don't want to get the app to have a bad reputation because I got something wrong. I don't want to make them feel like they're being screwed with in some way. So I'm very transparent about, look, why can't you do this? And what do you get for the subscription? And those kind of things.

I recommend being completely honest with your user. Right? And like I say, being very transparent about this is what this subscription is going give you. This is what you don't have without the subscription. And then it's up to them.

Right? Because I care greatly about what the users think and what they experience. So that's what I've been doing this week on that. I also did some game development. I've been working on my endless hurdles Halloween twenty twenty five event, and I'll talk about that in the future.

That is very close to being ready except for some new features that I need to add in. But hey, right now, my timeline is looking good. I'm still good for Halloween. I got one little bug that I need to iron out that I just don't feel good about. Other than that, it's been a very busy week, but I am super excited to have got the subradar stuff taken care of because that has been my procrastination and my blocker for a couple of weeks now.

And now I can move on and polish up the app a little bit, check things, really test it like crazy. And then I gotta do some screenshots for the store page, and then all the promotional material. Right? I gotta make videos and everything else. So I still got a lot to go, but that was a big one.

Because like I say, that involves users' money, and I take that kind of responsibility very seriously. Hope this has been helpful. Let me know. Reach out to me. Peter whidom dot com forward slash contact.

Love to talk about more about some of this stuff in the future. If you have questions or topics that you want me to talk about, reach out. Right? They don't have to be app specific. As you all know, this is my podcast for all the things I do.

It's a lot of app development, lot of game development, whether it's mobile, web, or whatever. But there are other things I do as well that I will talk about. But reach out, ask questions, and I will do my best to answer them for you in upcoming episodes. That's it, folks. Have a great one.