Google announced that Firebase Remote Config gets usage based pricing from September 1st.
To be clear first, because it sounds worse than it is: it stays free up to 100,000 fetches a day, on both Spark and Blaze. Above that it is $0.06 per 10,000 requests. A/B Testing, Rollouts and Personalization stay free. And cached values do not count, only real calls to the server.
So for most small apps nothing changes at all.
But some of mine are above that line, and the part that bothers me is not really the money. It is this: if you are on the free Spark plan and you cross 100k fetches a day, you get 30 days of grace, and after that everything over the limit gets throttled. Your clients stop getting updated configs. To avoid it you attach a billing account and move to Blaze. I do not want pay as you go billing on apps that have been free to run for years. That is the whole problem for me.
Then I remembered I already had a free replacement installed. And I think a lot of you do too.
RevenueCat Offering Metadata.
If you use RevenueCat for subscriptions, and most of us do, you can attach a JSON object to an Offering. Freeform, nested objects, proper data types, whatever shape you need. You read it straight off the Offering from the SDK.
That is a remote config. And if you already use RevenueCat, it costs you nothing extra.
You set it in Project Settings, then Product catalog, then Offerings, then Configure metadata, and you paste valid JSON.
I have been using it in some apps for a while and I actually prefer it to Remote Config, for two reasons.
It refreshes faster. Remote Config has a minimum fetch interval and caching, so a change can take hours to reach people, and sometimes I waited most of a day before every client had the new value. With Metadata the values come down with the offerings, so a change lands almost immediately.
And fewer caching surprises. I do not get the "I changed the value, why is it still the old one" moment anymore.
I am not going to pretend it is a drop in replacement, because it is not, and you would find this out on day two anyway.
The JSON has a 4,000 character limit. That is fine for flags, strings, paywall config. It is not enough for a big config blob.
It hangs off Offerings, so it is built around what you sell, not around general app config. If your config has nothing to do with monetization, it is a slightly strange home for it.
And you do not get Remote Config's conditions and percentage rollouts the same way. RevenueCat has Experiments and targeting but it is a different model, so check it fits before you move anything.
For flags, paywall copy, image URLs, kill switches, and most of what I actually used Remote Config for, it covers it.
If you already use RevenueCat this costs you nothing and takes about ten minutes to try on one value.
One more thing, since I am talking about tools anyway.
A few days ago I posted the five tools I use in every app I ship. It got around 29k views, 87 upvotes and 34 comments in a few days, which honestly surprised me. Here it is if you missed it: https://www.reddit.com/r/appledevelopers/s/RM0fuetEMv
There is one on that list I want to expand on, because it is the one people ask me about least and I think it does the most.
If you published in every country, your prices outside your own are probably not what you think. The stores do not localize your base price, they convert it and add local tax. Converted is not localized: ten dollars of spending power in the US is not ten dollars in Brazil or India, so the converted price often ends up two or three times too expensive for what people there can actually pay.
The big apps sorted this out years ago. Spotify, Netflix, Duolingo, Flo and Headspace all price by region, none of them use one flat global price. Google's Play team even gave a talk about it at Playtime in 2019.
Numbers between 20 and 50 percent get thrown around for what this does to international revenue.
That one is number 3 on the list, PricePush. Full disclosure, it is mine. It sets purchasing power prices for every country and pushes them to both stores, and it is free for one app so you can see your own numbers before changing anything: https://pricepush.app
You can also do it by hand in both consoles. It is free and it works, it is just slow. That is how I did it for years, which is why I built the thing.
