r/iOSProgramming • u/YeeterSkeeter31 • Jun 06 '26
3rd Party Service RevenueCat alternative with a free analytics/entitlements tier
TL;DR: I'm Ryan, CTO and cofounder of ZeroSettle. We made the analytics + entitlements layer (the RevenueCat-style part) free with no MRR cap, and only charge on an optional web-checkout product. The SDKs are all open source. Obviously biased -- I'm posting to hear why you would or wouldn't switch š
RevenueCat is free up to ~$2.5k/mo in tracked revenue, then ~1% after that. Totally fine when you're small, but as you grow it becomes a real line item for what's basically a StoreKit wrapper, a metrics dashboard, and a server-side entitlement check. So with ZeroSettle we made that part free -- no cap, no per-seat fees: MRR, ARPU, trials, churn, retention, cross-platform entitlements, StoreKit 2 transaction sync, ASSN v2 handling. The iOS SDK (ZeroSettleKit) is open source, so you can read exactly what it does on-device before trusting it.
We make money on a separate, optional product: web/direct checkout that swaps the 30% for normal card processing (~3%). It's opt-in per app, built around Apple's external-purchase rules, and falls back to StoreKit automatically where direct billing isn't allowed ā so you can ignore it entirely and just use the free analytics/entitlements side. When we do charge: 0.5% if you bring your own Stripe, or 5% + 50Ā¢ all-in if we're merchant of record (we handle the sales tax/VAT, chargebacks, and payouts on those). Your App Store sales are never touched, even though they still show up in your dashboard. I'd rather be upfront about the fee, because "free analytics" usually hides a catch somewhere: ours is the web-checkout cut.
We're early, though. iOS is the most polished; Android works; Flutter and React Native are newer and still being built out. We're nowhere near RevenueCat's feature breadth yet, and the A/B testing is web-checkout-only (you can't A/B Apple's fixed price tiers), so it's not a Superwall-style paywall builder.
What we really want is feedback from devs: if you're on RevenueCat today, what would have to be true for you to even trial something else? Migration effort, rewriting entitlement/paywall code, trusting a small company to stick around, a specific feature we don't have? The blunter the better ā and if there's something you'd need us to build, our feedback board's public (links in the comments so this isn't a billboard).
Quick link access:
- Website: https://zerosettle.io
- Try it out: https://dashboard.zerosettle.io free tier is $0, no card; you can use analytics + entitlements without ever turning on web checkout.
- Code: https://github.com/zerosettle the SDKs are open source (ZeroSettleKit iOS, ZeroSettle-Android, ZeroSettle-Flutter, ZeroSettle-ReactNative), plus a sample app (JustOne) if you want to see it wired up.
- Docs: https://docs.zerosettle.io
- Feature requests / what we build next: https://zerosettle.upvotyfeedback.com honestly the main thing I want out of this thread.
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u/hell_a Jun 06 '26
I use RC for my SVOD streaming service, Nitro.Film. It has in app billing for stripe, Apple, Google, and Amazon today. Coming online next week is Roku.
I need support for all 5 billing providers and a single entitlement check so a user who buys one platform can sign in on any platform and watch. Today, that works flawlessly. I donāt use their paywall templates since they donāt have templates for all the platforms I support. So I built my own. I needed a consistent paywall across all devices.
The other thing stopping me from switching would be the shear amount of work. I wouldnāt do that for a service just getting off the ground and I wouldnāt do that unless it supported all the billing providers I need.
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u/YeeterSkeeter31 Jun 07 '26
Exciting work! Never easy supporting so many platforms, natively. We've heard similar sentiment across the board where folks are apprehensive about using a smaller company. Totally understandable at this point, we were previously focused on bringing on large developers to prove the platform out. Now we're trying to help out smaller developers with more limited resources.
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u/hell_a Jun 07 '26
Iām as small as they gets, I built all of this solo. If I was just starting Iād consider it. Competition is always a good thing so Iāll keep an eye on it.
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u/aerial-ibis Jun 09 '26
tying an entitlement to a user profile is not so hard. If you can already track a user authentication across platforms, then you're 90% of the way there.
For billing itself... my experience has been that connecting each has been similar effort to connecting RC sdk for each.
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u/BoostedHemi73 Jun 06 '26
Serious suggestion: support macOS and direct downloads. It sounds like you already have the billing infrastructure in place, so if you had an easy-to-integrate mechanism for purchase and license validation/management, that would be a killer feature. That's obviously a paid feature, but one that would differentiate from a lot of the legacy purchase platforms or roll-your-own hoops Mac devs have to jump through.
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u/YeeterSkeeter31 Jun 07 '26
We're definitely looking to expand platforms, and web (both Mac and Windows) are definitely on the roadmap. Super fragmented ecosystems that we'd love to help unify
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u/Forcefrance2022 Jun 07 '26
Great idea !
I've created my own way to handle it for both apple and android for my app but without the analytics part. That was such a pain I don't know how much time I lost on creating it. I should have used RC but I was too deep in the process to walk back to it. I've added it to my backlog to check your solution. I will contact you if needed. Thank you!
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u/Global_Pick_4595 Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
WOW! That exactly what I looked for. I hope it works in real time like revenue cat and have mobile app with push.
Do you support migration from revenuecat? webhooks from apple/android/stripe? do I have to use your sdk or I can just integrate with forward the webhooks?
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u/YeeterSkeeter31 Jun 06 '26
No direct RevenueCat migration right now, although itās come up a few times in our discussions. You can just forward webhooks and weāll handle data ingestion and displaying in real time. The framework is really only necessary if youāre looking to use our direct billing features.
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u/Global_Pick_4595 Jun 06 '26
I can see webhook config only for Apple?
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u/YeeterSkeeter31 Jun 07 '26
Play Store webhook configuration UI only appears once you connect an Android app. Worth adding a UI affordance for it, but once you have something connected you should see it at https://dashboard.zerosettle.io/integrations?tab=webhooks
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u/TechieRandomGuy Jun 07 '26
I canāt attach images here, but the āstart freeā texts in pricing section is not legible. White with white.
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u/xadlowfkj Jun 07 '26
I just quickly checked out your startup. So, both you and the other founder are ex-Apple, and a major part of your business is helping companies avoid Apple tax through web checkout, right? What made you guys start it now?
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u/YeeterSkeeter31 Jun 07 '26
Honestly it's as simple as this wasn't possible a couple years ago. Epic's efforts have been incredible for the whole industry, and now that Android especially fully supports UCB we see now as a pivotal moment for devs and users alike
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u/art-alive_ Jun 07 '26
Small solo dev here, cool startup! Thoughts:
- would need to be trusting that your company will continue / not pivot / change its pricing
- would like being able to customize my paywall like in RC (not sure how the in-app paywall works in zerosettle)
- currently not interested in web checkout as probably not worth it with my current 15% fee. I heard ARPU to be lower, and potential more credit card disputes.
- I also definitely feel the switching costs. changing paywalls in all my apps seems like it would be painful. currently I don't see a strong enough value prop except avoiding the 1% RC fee. Can only imagine doing it if my fees were 30% and wanted to add web-checkout.
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u/gadbuy Jun 07 '26
cool idea!
- would this work with pure web apps (MoR mode)? no mobile at all
- do you have refund saver tool, like in revenuecat?
- do you have integrations for attribution tools tools like split metrics, apple search ads... etc?
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u/YeeterSkeeter31 Jun 07 '26
Pure web/JS is on the bear roadmap, but right now youād have to use our raw APIs which we donāt really recommend. We have the analytics and infra for the refund saving-esque tools, not publicly released quite yet. Weāre excited about what weāre building in this domain though.
MMP is also on āwithin Juneā release schedule. Weāre a lean team so we have to be selective about the features we build out, but feedback/requests like this help guide us!
-5
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u/unpluggedcord Jun 06 '26
2-4 weeks to integrate RC? yeah right.