The Short Answer
RevenueCat is the default and prices like one: free to $2,500 in monthly tracked revenue, then 1% of tracked revenue, across the widest SDK surface in the category — iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native, Expo, Kotlin Multiplatform, Unity, Cordova, Capacitor and Roku, behind 130,000+ apps and $16B+ of processed revenue. Adapty matches the 1% with a more generous $5,000 free threshold and a paywall builder as its centre of gravity, then meters several capabilities separately. Qonversion undercuts both on rate — free to $10,000 monthly tracked revenue, then 0.6% on Starter or 0.8% on Growth. Superwall does something structurally different: the subscription infrastructure is free at any scale, and the 1% applies only to revenue its own paywalls converted, above $10,000 a month.
So the decision is not "which percentage is lowest." It is: do you want to pay a fee proportional to your whole business, or only to the part of it a vendor's tooling demonstrably produced? Answer that, then check whether the vendor on the right side of it covers your platforms.
Four Percentages, Four Denominators
Set the rates aside and look at what each one multiplies.
| Platform | Free up to | Rate | Charged on |
|---|---|---|---|
| RevenueCat Pro | $2,500 MTR | 1% | All monthly tracked revenue, measured pre-platform-cut |
| RevenueCat Growth Tools | — | 1% | Only conversions from the tools you use — Paywalls and web-to-app Funnels — with your own infrastructure underneath |
| Adapty Pro | $5,000 over a rolling 30 days | 1% | All monthly revenue — subscriptions, renewals and one-time purchases, in USD before platform cut — plus separately metered add-ons |
| Qonversion Starter | $10,000 MTR | 0.6% | All tracked revenue |
| Qonversion Growth | $10,000 MTR | 0.8% | All tracked revenue; adds experiments, Refund Keeper, raw export, 99.99% SLA |
| Superwall | $10,000/mo paywall-attributed revenue | 1% | Paywall-attributed revenue only. Infrastructure — entitlements, purchase APIs, receipt validation, webhooks, analytics, SQL Query API — is free at any scale |
Two rows in that table are the whole article. Superwall's denominator is a subset of the others', and can be a very small subset: if your existing paywalls keep converting most of your revenue, Superwall bills you on almost nothing while still running your entitlements. And RevenueCat's Growth Tools option is the same idea approached from the opposite direction — bring your own infrastructure and pay only on conversions from the tools you actually use. The category leader and its most structurally distinct challenger have converged on the same insight from different starting points, which is a stronger signal about where this market is going than anything either says in marketing.
One measurement detail worth knowing before you model anything: RevenueCat and Adapty both measure revenue before the platform cut. You are paying a percentage of the gross number Apple and Google bill, not of what lands in your account. At a 15% small-business App Store rate the difference is modest; at 30% it is not, and it makes the effective rate on money you actually receive meaningfully higher than the headline.
What It Costs at $50K, $250K and $1M a Month
Same app, three sizes, list rates. For Superwall, the middle column is the vendor's own published scenario — half of revenue converting through its paywalls — and the outer columns show the range.
| Monthly revenue | RevenueCat / Adapty (1%) | Qonversion Starter (0.6%) | Superwall — 50% attributed | Superwall — all attributed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $50,000 | $500 | $300 | $250 | $500 |
| $250,000 | $2,500 | $1,500 | $1,250 | $2,500 |
| $1,000,000 | $10,000 ($120,000/yr) | $6,000 ($72,000/yr) | $5,000 ($60,000/yr) | $10,000 |
Computed at published list rates on total monthly revenue, before any deduction for the free band and before add-ons. Superwall's $250 figure at $50,000 with half attributed is the vendor's own worked example. All four vendors quote Enterprise tiers with volume discounts at this scale, so treat the $1M row as a list-price benchmark to negotiate against rather than a price anyone pays.
The row that changes decisions is the last one. $120,000 a year is a mobile engineer, and it is being spent on infrastructure that Superwall gives away at that same scale. That is not an argument that RevenueCat is overpriced — 130,000 apps and $16B processed is a lot of correctness bought cheaply, and StoreKit edge cases have eaten more engineering years than most teams want to count. It is an argument that at $1M a month you should be running this comparison at all, because the two models diverge by a full salary and most teams never revisit a decision they made at $5,000 a month.
Notice also which way the Qonversion gap moves. At $50,000 a month, 0.6% versus 1% is $200 — not worth switching for. At $1M a month it is $48,000 a year against Starter, or $24,000 against Growth at 0.8% — which is. Percentage-of-revenue pricing means the case for the cheaper rate strengthens exactly as your switching cost grows, which is a well-designed trap and worth naming as one. Run the numbers on your own figures with our percentage calculator before you assume the difference is noise.
The Part That Isn't in the 1%
Adapty is the one where the headline rate understates the bill, and it is transparent about this rather than sneaky — the meters are published. Above the $5,000 free threshold, on top of the 1%:
- Refund Saver — 0.2% of monthly revenue
- Ads Manager — 3.5% of monthly ad spend
- Attribution — $0.03 per attributed install
- Adapty Mail — 20% revenue share; Finance — 2.5%, both subject to qualification
Each is free under $5,000, so none of this shows up while you are small. Work an example at scale: an app doing $250,000 a month, spending $80,000 a month on user acquisition at a $2 cost per install, so 40,000 attributed installs. Base 1% is $2,500. Refund Saver adds $500. Ads Manager adds $2,800. Attribution adds $1,200. Total $7,000 against a headline of $2,500 — an effective rate of 2.8%, not 1%. Halve the CPI and the attribution line doubles; the meters move independently of revenue, which is the point.
That is not a gotcha, because you would otherwise be paying an MMP and a refund tool separately and those have their own prices. But it does mean the 1%-versus-1% comparison against RevenueCat is only valid for a team using the base product alone. If you intend to run Adapty's growth stack, price the whole basket. And note the asymmetry in what the meters attach to: Ads Manager charges on ad spend and Attribution on installs, neither of which is revenue, so both keep charging during a campaign that does not convert.
Qonversion has the opposite shape — capability moves you between two rates rather than adding meters. Starter at 0.6% covers advanced analytics and webhooks; Growth at 0.8% is what unlocks A/B experiments, Apple Search Ads attribution, Refund Keeper, raw data export and the 99.99% SLA. Most teams comparing on the 0.6% figure actually want Growth, so compare at 0.8%. One correction while you are checking: several of the comparison pages currently ranking for these queries cite a $99 monthly minimum on Qonversion's paid plans, and Qonversion's own pricing page states no minimum for any tier. Confirm it in writing, but do not let a stale figure decide a shortlist.
Infrastructure and Paywall Are Two Purchases
The reason the pricing models differ is that the vendors disagree about what the product is, and each one's bill follows from its answer.
Infrastructure-first. RevenueCat built purchase plumbing in 2017 and the analytics arrived as a byproduct: server-side receipt validation across StoreKit, Google Play, Amazon, Roku and the web, with a unified customer record. Because every trial, renewal, grace period and billing retry passes through it at store level, the MRR and churn charts reflect app-store reality in ways a Stripe-first dashboard cannot. Superwall is also infrastructure-first — server-computed entitlements synced from App Store Server Notifications V2 and Google Real-Time Developer Notifications, webhooks standardised across App Store, Play Store and Stripe, and row-level-secured SQL access over ClickHouse on every plan — it just declines to charge for that layer.
Paywall-first. Adapty organises everything around the monetisation screen: a no-code Paywall and Flow Builder with an AI generator, A/B testing with an Autopilot mode, audience targeting, localisations and remote config, all so a marketer can iterate without shipping an app release. Superwall shares that thesis and has the most specific claim behind it — across 40M+ measured paywall opens, multi-page paywalls converted 37% better than single-page ones — which is the kind of finding that only pays off if you can ship paywall changes constantly. Qonversion sits between the two, pairing a drag-and-drop native-UI builder with revenue-judged experiments that carry built-in statistical significance.
Why this matters for the bill: if you are buying infrastructure, paying a percentage of all revenue for it is defensible — the infrastructure touches all of it. If you are buying paywall experimentation, paying a percentage of all revenue means paying for conversions your existing paywalls would have produced anyway, and an attributed-revenue model is the honest one. Work out which half you are actually short of before you compare rates, because the two halves are separable at both ends of this market now.
Lock-In, and the Subscribers You Bring With You
The sticky layer is not the paywall editor. It is the entitlement and receipt state — the mapping from a customer to what they are entitled to, built up over every renewal, upgrade, refund and grace period the app has ever processed. Swapping that mid-flight is the migration everyone underestimates, and it is why teams stay on a vendor whose pricing has stopped making sense.
Three things materially reduce that risk, and they are worth weighting in the decision:
- Open-source SDKs. Adapty's and Superwall's SDKs are open source, which means the client-side integration is inspectable and forkable rather than a black box you are trusting.
- Raw data access. Superwall ships SQL access to subscription data over ClickHouse on every plan, including the free one; Qonversion puts raw data export on Growth. An export you can run yourself, today, is worth more than a contractual right to request one.
- Import policy. Superwall states that imported subscribers from a previous backend are never billed. That is a migration-economics decision as much as a pricing one — it removes the penalty for arriving with an existing book of subscribers, which is precisely the moment a percentage-of-revenue model would otherwise be most punishing.
Ask each vendor the same three questions: can I export full subscriber and entitlement state on demand without asking you; what happens to my app's purchase flow on the day I stop paying; and are subscribers I migrate in charged at the same rate as ones acquired on your platform. The answers vary more than the marketing does. The general case for why these questions belong in every SaaS contract is in our piece on SaaS vendor shutdown risk.
Which One
| Your situation | Best fit | Runner-up | Rule out |
|---|---|---|---|
| First paid app, under $10K/mo | Qonversion — free to $10,000, four times RevenueCat's threshold | Superwall (also free to $10,000, on attributed revenue) | RevenueCat, on threshold alone at this size |
| Roku, Unity, Amazon or unusual platform coverage | RevenueCat — widest SDK surface by a clear margin | None that reach as far | All three others, on coverage |
| Paywall iteration is the growth strategy | Superwall — instant publishing, and billing aligned to what the paywall earned | Adapty, for the Flow Builder and Autopilot A/B | Neither — Qonversion's experiments sit on the 0.8% tier |
| Your IAP infrastructure already works | Superwall — free backend, pay only on attributed conversions | RevenueCat Growth Tools, same idea from the other side | Any full-stack rate on revenue you already handle |
| Lowest rate on total revenue | Qonversion Growth at 0.8% — the tier that actually has experiments | Qonversion Starter at 0.6% if you need analytics only | Comparing on the 0.6% headline you will not be on |
| Attribution, refund recovery and ads in one place | Adapty — deepest add-on catalogue | Qonversion Growth (Refund Keeper, Search Ads) | Judging Adapty on its 1% headline rather than the basket |
| Past $1M/month | Whichever you negotiate hardest — all four quote Enterprise with volume discounts | Model Superwall's attributed base as the alternative to a % of everything | Paying any list rate at this scale |
The single most common mistake in this category is picking at $2,000 a month and never revisiting at $200,000, by which point the denominator you signed up to is quietly costing more than the engineer you would have hired to replace it. Put a calendar reminder on the decision, not just on the renewal. Full sourced profiles for all four — with the pricing pages we checked and the dates we checked them — are in our subscription analytics directory.
FAQ
Is RevenueCat or Adapty cheaper?
Level on headline rate — both 1% of monthly tracked revenue. Adapty's free tier is more generous ($5,000 versus $2,500), which matters only to very small apps. The real difference is metering: Adapty charges separately for Refund Saver (0.2% of revenue), Ads Manager (3.5% of ad spend), Attribution ($0.03 per attributed install) and others. Using the base product alone, they are near-identical on price; using Adapty's growth stack, the effective rate is several times higher.
What is the cheapest mobile subscription platform?
On rate, Qonversion — free to $10,000 monthly tracked revenue, then 0.6%. On total bill it depends on your paywalls, because Superwall's infrastructure is free at any scale and its 1% applies only to paywall-attributed revenue. An app that keeps its existing paywalls can run Superwall's backend for nothing.
Does Superwall charge on all my revenue?
No — only on revenue its own paywalls converted, above $10,000 a month. Revenue the platform did not help earn is never billed, and imported subscribers from a previous backend are never billed. The vendor's published example: $50,000 a month with half converting through Superwall paywalls costs $250 a month.
What does RevenueCat cost at $1 million a month?
$10,000 a month at the 1% list rate — $120,000 a year. Nobody at that scale pays list: Enterprise is custom-quoted with volume discounts, flexible tracking configurations and custom SLAs. Use the list figure as the benchmark you negotiate against, and as the number to compare an attributed-revenue model to.
Can I use Superwall and RevenueCat together?
They overlap deliberately, so it is worth thinking about rather than assuming. Superwall's infrastructure layer is free at any scale, and RevenueCat sells a Growth Tools option that keeps your own infrastructure and charges 1% only on conversions from the tools you use. Both vendors have built a way to sell you half the stack; the question is which half each is better at for your app.
Do these platforms charge before or after Apple's cut?
RevenueCat and Adapty both measure revenue pre-platform-cut, meaning the percentage applies to the gross figure Apple or Google bills rather than what reaches your bank. At a 30% store commission that makes the effective rate on money you actually receive noticeably higher than the headline, which is worth building into any model you run.