From 30 Days to Less Than 24 Hours: My Journey to Implementing Billing and Subscription Management in a Mobile App

This article outlines the challenges and transformative steps I took to save the development time and increase efficiency as an Indie developer for one of my apps Sweet Scripts and sharing my experience here.

The Mindset

In the rapidly evolving landscape of mobile applications, the agility to implement and refine features swiftly is a significant competitive edge. Subscription services, a vital revenue stream, were once a month-long endeavor in our development cycle. This narrative changed dramatically when we streamlined our process, cutting it down to less than a day.

The freemium model is likely the prevailing business model in the app industry, where developers employ subscriptions or one-time payments to offer their app’s premium features. Developing support for subscriptions is among the most time-intensive aspects of the application. It’s also worth noting that having a presence on multiple stores, such as the App Store and Google Play Store, can double the effort because a unified dashboard is often required to monitor and compare revenue from each platform.

As the team expands, the responsibility for managing and monitoring subscriptions and revenue will become part of the product team’s duties. They will need to constantly launch new experiments and fine-tune parameters to discover the most effective ways to increase revenue…