In April 2025, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers handed down a landmark decision in Epic Games v. Apple, ruling that Apple could no longer block developers from linking to alternative payment methods outside of the App Store. For app makers, this unlocked a new world of opportunity: selling digital goods and subscriptions without surrendering up to 30 percent of their revenue to Apple. Yet alongside that opportunity came fresh headaches—handling taxes, regional compliance, and subscription infrastructure on multiple platforms. Enter Paddle and RevenueCat, two payment‐focused companies that have just announced an integration designed to ease this exact pain point.

When the Epic v. Apple decision landed in April 2025, developers celebrated the end of Apple’s iron grip on in‐app payments. Apps could now direct users to pay via websites, credit cards, or other services without remitting Apple’s commission. In essence, Apple had to allow “external links” to payment pages inside iOS apps, at least in the U.S.. This shift is seismic: it erodes one of the App Store’s primary levers for revenue and forces developers to rethink monetization strategies. But developers who want to accept payments outside the App Store now face a thorny question: how to spin up and maintain their own payment infrastructure—across iOS, Android, and the web—without building everything from scratch.

E-commerce by itself can be deceptively complex. You need to calculate and remit sales tax (which in the U.S. varies state by state), manage value‐added tax (VAT) in Europe, handle refunds and chargebacks, detect fraud, and ensure compliance with local regulations. On top of that, subscription‐based apps have to synchronize entitlement checks across mobile and web so that a purchase made on the website is honored inside the iPhone or Android app, and vice versa. That’s a lot of engineering and legal overhead for a small or mid‐sized team.

Paddle is best known as an end‐to‐end payment processor for desktop and web software vendors. They act as the “merchant of record”—meaning they handle sales tax, VAT, compliance, and even chargebacks, so individual developers aren’t on the hook. RevenueCat, on the other hand, provides a subscription “back end” that abstracts the complexities of in‐app purchase APIs (Apple’s StoreKit, Google Play Billing) and centralizes subscription data, analytics, and receipt validation. Before this partnership, if you wanted to sell a subscription on iOS through RevenueCat, you still needed to set up a separate web pathway (with Stripe, Braintree, or something else) if you hoped to offer customers a cheaper “web price” to avoid Apple’s cut.

By integrating their platforms, Paddle and RevenueCat now offer a unified solution: Paddle handles the web payments, tax, and compliance, while RevenueCat becomes the single source of truth for subscription entitlements and analytics across iOS, Android, and web. In practical terms, that means:

• Unified subscription state: A user who subscribes on the web (through Paddle) instantly has access inside your iOS or Android app, because RevenueCat synchronizes the purchase in real time.
• Centralized analytics dashboard: RevenueCat’s dashboard shows revenue figures, churn rates, cohort analyses, and other performance metrics across platforms—no more juggling spreadsheets or combining data feeds from different sources.
• No‐code setup: According to Paddle’s website, developers can connect RevenueCat and Paddle in a matter of minutes, without requiring deep backend changes.
• Tax and compliance out of the box: Paddle’s merchant‐of‐record model ensures that sales tax, VAT, and other regional compliance issues are handled so that developers don’t need to become tax experts themselves.

Jimmy Fitzgerald, Paddle’s CEO, puts it plainly: “There’s a huge opportunity for subscription apps to grow revenue by expanding to the web—but that shift brings new technical and operational challenges. By partnering with RevenueCat, we’re making it easier for developers to manage subscriptions across platforms, while giving them more control over how and where they monetize.”

For indie developers and smaller studios, the ability to experiment with price points outside of the App Store is huge. Say you have a meditation or fitness app. Historically, you might charge $9.99 per month inside the App Store, with Apple keeping roughly $3. If you now drive users to your website, you could charge $7.99, retain the full amount, and hope that some of those web subscribers end up installing the app anyway. But building an “App + web” subscription infrastructure is not trivial—especially if you want to track conversion funnels, A/B test price tiers, or run analytics on geographic performance.

With Paddle + RevenueCat, you get:

1. Flexible pricing: Charge different rates on web vs. App Store without juggling separate backend systems.
2. Unified subscription entitlements: A person who subscribed from a desktop browser sees the same premium content the moment they open the iOS app.
3. Developer‐friendly dashboards: Rather than logging into multiple portals (Stripe Dashboard, App Store Connect, Google Play Console), you check RevenueCat’s dashboard for a holistic view.
4. Peace of mind on tax and compliance: Paddle’s merchant of record status shifts the tax calculation, VAT filing, and compliance burdens to them—great news for teams with limited legal budgets.

Larger players—think SaaS companies or “app‐tier” services like language‐learning platforms—also stand to benefit. Even if you already have an elaborate billing system on the web (Stripe, Braintree, Chargebee, etc.), using Paddle as your “web checkout” can simplify international tax management, which often costs a small fortune if you set it up in‐house. And plugging that directly into RevenueCat means you maintain one centralized view of who’s paying, who’s churning, and who’s upgrading, regardless of whether they tapped “Buy” in your app or on your website.

How it works

1. Developer signs up for both Paddle and RevenueCat (if not already a customer).
2. Paddle account: You configure your products, pricing tiers, and regional tax options inside Paddle. Paddle then gives you a “checkout URL” or embeddable widget for your website.
3. RevenueCat account: You set up your subscription “products” in RevenueCat, naming them identically to what you created in Paddle and in your App Store/Google Play Console. RevenueCat provides SDKs for iOS, Android, and web.
4. Integration steps: In RevenueCat’s dashboard, you navigate to the “Integrations” page, select “Paddle,” and follow a step-by-step wizard. This usually involves copying a few API keys from Paddle into RevenueCat and vice versa.
5. Testing: With a sandbox or test mode enabled, you simulate a purchase on the web (via Paddle) and verify that RevenueCat correctly registers the entitlement—unlocking content in your app during testing.
6. Go live: Once everything looks good, you ship the update to your app stores (or add the link to your marketing materials). Now, customers can subscribe on the web, and RevenueCat ensures that your mobile apps recognize the purchase immediately.

Throughout that process, RevenueCat’s dashboard becomes a “single pane of glass” where you track revenue metrics in real time, including monthly recurring revenue (MRR), payer count, churn, and more. Meanwhile, Paddle sends you settlement reports, handles chargebacks, and remits income to your bank account net of taxes and fees.

Costs and fees

No partnership is free—Paddle charges a per‐transaction fee (typically around 5% + $0.50, depending on volume), and RevenueCat charges based on monthly active subscribers (starting at around $10 per month for small teams, scaling up). However, for many developers, paying Paddle and RevenueCat is still cheaper than giving Apple 15–30 percent, especially if you drive a substantial chunk of signups via the web.

Throughout 2025, expect more tools and libraries that focus on “App Store escape hatches.” Paddle is not alone—other merchants of record (MOR) such as FastSpring, Lemon Squeezy, and Chargebee are also vying for a share of the newly de‐monopolized iOS payment landscape. Meanwhile, subscription backends like RevenueCat face competition from both open-source solutions and big players (like Stripe’s in‐app purchase APIs). The differentiator, for now, is who can make the integration as painless as possible.

Here are some emerging questions as we move further away from the days when Apple ruled subscription infrastructure:

1. Will Apple retaliate? Although Apple is complying with the court ruling, the App Store Review Guidelines remain somewhat ambiguous. Some non-reader apps that tried to launch without in-app purchases passed initial reviews by accident, only to be flagged later. Developers must still weigh the risk of “review rollback” or sudden policy reversals.
2. How will international regulations evolve? As more developers sell directly through web checkouts, they must navigate new privacy, tax, and payment regulations globally. Some countries may impose stricter data localization or digital services taxes—issues that Paddle must continually adapt to.
3. Will subscription fatigue kick in? Both developers and consumers now have more options than ever. Will users become overwhelmed by different pricing schemes—“App Store price vs. web price”? Will developers cannibalize their own App Store sales by steering everyone to the web?
4. Will Google follow suit globally? Google Play has historically been more lenient than Apple, but they still charge a significant commission on digital goods. If they see a mass exodus of devs pushing users to third-party billing, we could see pressure for similar rulings or policy changes on Android.

For developers who’ve been itching to break free of the 30 percent App Store squeeze, Paddle and RevenueCat have just delivered a timely lifeline.