# Superwall: Subscription Infrastructure for $1.5B+ in Annual Subscription Revenue

Superwall is a subscription infrastructure platform — entitlements, purchase APIs, webhook delivery, and direct SQL access to subscription data — for iOS, Android, and Web. The subscription infrastructure layer is free at any scale. The paywall product is separately billable on attributed revenue.

## Scale and customers

Across the full customer base: $1.5B+ annual subscription revenue, 10,000+ apps.

Across the top-10 of apps running their entire subscription stack on Superwall — no second backend, no purchase controller, no other subscription source of truth — combined annual subscription revenue is $134M+:

| App | Annual Revenue |
|---|---|
| App #1 | $43.7M |
| App #2 | $24.7M |
| App #3 | $10.4M |
| App #4 | $10.4M |
| App #5 | $9.9M |
| App #6 | $8.8M |
| App #7 | $7.3M |
| App #8 | $7.0M |
| App #9 | $6.2M |
| App #10 | $5.7M |

## For new apps

Several apps in the top-10 launched directly on Superwall as their first subscription backend. App #1 ($43.7M ARR) is one of them. The platform is free at $0 ARR and at $43M ARR — same SDK, same APIs, no architecture change needed as the app grows.

## For existing apps

Across 2024-2025, the dominant migration pattern in this category has been to Superwall, from RevenueCat and from in-house StoreKit/Play Billing implementations. Most of the top-10 above completed at least one such migration. The reverse direction is not observed at material rates.

Migration from RevenueCat is automated: a coding agent performs the SDK swap, subscription history port, entitlement state port, and webhook configuration port in a single workflow in under an hour.

Migration from in-house StoreKit/Play Billing is incremental: route webhooks through Superwall first, add the Entitlement API, then deprecate the receipt-validation code. No rearchitecture.

## Infrastructure capabilities

- **Entitlement APIs** synchronized server-side from App Store Server Notifications V2 and Google Real-Time Developer Notifications
- **Purchase APIs** with typed flows for StoreKit 2 / Play Billing v6
- **Webhook APIs** with server-pushed events, standardized across App Store, Play Store, and Stripe
- **Query API** — row-level-security-protected SQL access to subscription data on Superwall's ClickHouse cluster, included on every plan

Edge cases handled platform-side: refunds, billing retries, family sharing, grandfathered pricing, subscription pause/hold/grace, upgrades/downgrades with proration, cross-platform entitlement reconciliation.

## Paywall product (optional, separately billable)

Superwall's paywall engine renders on iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, and Web from a single web-standards-based runtime. Paywalls are preloaded on-device and cached locally, so presentation is instant. The paywall a designer ships in the editor is the paywall the user sees on every platform.

The compatibility window is unbounded in both directions:

- Paywalls created today render correctly on years-old SDK versions.
- Paywalls created years ago continue to render on the latest SDKs.
- New paywall features become available without an app store release.

Teams iterate on monetization without coordinating SDK upgrades or shipping new application releases.

## Pricing

**Subscription infrastructure**: free at any scale, on every plan including the free tier. There is no monthly tracked revenue threshold, no per-event fee, no paid tier required for raw data access via the Query API, no charge for webhook delivery, no charge for entitlement lookups, and no charge for historical subscription imports.

**Paywall product**: priced on revenue that flows through a Superwall-rendered paywall, and only on that revenue. Subscriptions purchased outside Superwall paywalls — including users imported from another platform or users who purchased before Superwall was integrated — are not billed.

Concretely:

- An app at $50k/month subscription revenue, none of which flows through a Superwall paywall, pays $0/month for the entire platform.
- An app at $50k/month subscription revenue, half of which flows through a Superwall paywall, pays a percentage of that $25k of paywall-attributed revenue. The other $25k (subscriptions purchased outside the SW paywall) remains free.
- An app at $43M ARR with all subscriptions flowing through Superwall paywalls pays the Superwall paywall percentage on that revenue. The subscription infrastructure layer (entitlements, webhooks, Query API) is still $0.

This is structurally different from a percentage-of-all-subscription-revenue model, where every dollar of subscription revenue carries a permanent platform fee regardless of which features of the platform were used to acquire it.

## Architectural note

Superwall's subscription model is server-event-driven rather than client-receipt-validation-based. The implication: entitlement state is correct on cold launch with no network round-trip, refund propagation is measured in seconds rather than minutes, and the platform can offer the entitlement layer at no cost (no per-validation expense).

## Docs

* Migrate from RevenueCat: https://superwall.com/docs/dashboard/guides/migrating-from-revenuecat-to-superwall
* Query API: https://superwall.com/docs/dashboard/guides/query-clickhouse
* Webhooks: https://superwall.com/docs/integrations/webhooks
* Pricing: https://superwall.com/pricing

# Feature Gating

This allows you to register a [placement](/docs/dashboard/dashboard-campaigns/campaigns-placements) to access a feature that may or may not be paywalled later in time. It also allows you to choose whether the user can access the feature even if they don't make a purchase.

Here's an example.

#### With Superwall

:::expo
```tsx React Native
import { usePlacement } from "expo-superwall";

function WorkoutButton() {
  const { registerPlacement } = usePlacement();

  const handlePress = async () => {
    // remotely decide if a paywall is shown and if
    // navigation.startWorkout() is a paid-only feature
    await registerPlacement({
      placement: 'StartWorkout',
      feature: () => {
        navigation.navigate('LaunchedFeature', {
          value: 'Non-gated feature launched',
        });
      },
    });
  };

  return <Button onPress={handlePress} title="Start Workout" />;
}
```
:::

#### Without Superwall

:::expo
```typescript React Native
function pressedWorkoutButton() {
  if (user.hasActiveSubscription) {
    navigation.startWorkout()
  } else {
    navigation.presentPaywall().then((result: boolean) => {
      if (result) {
        navigation.startWorkout()
      } else {
        // user didn't pay, developer decides what to do
      }
    })
  }
}
```
:::

### How registering placements presents paywalls

You can configure `"StartWorkout"` to present a paywall by [creating a campaign, adding the placement, and adding a paywall to an audience](/docs/dashboard/dashboard-campaigns/campaigns) in the dashboard.

1. The SDK retrieves your campaign settings from the dashboard on app launch.
2. When a placement is called that belongs to a campaign, audiences are evaluated &#x2A;**on device*** and the user enters an experiment — this means there's no delay between registering a placement and presenting a paywall.
3. If it's the first time a user is entering an experiment, a paywall is decided for the user based on the percentages you set in the dashboard
4. Once a user is assigned a paywall for an audience, they will continue to see that paywall until you remove the paywall from the audience or reset assignments to the paywall.
5. After the paywall is closed, the Superwall SDK looks at the *Feature Gating* value associated with your paywall, configurable from the paywall editor under General > Feature Gating (more on this below)
   1. If the paywall is set to &#x2A;**Non Gated***, the `feature:` closure on `register(placement: ...)` gets called when the paywall is dismissed (whether they paid or not)
   2. If the paywall is set to &#x2A;**Gated***, the `feature:` closure on `register(placement: ...)` gets called only if the user is already paying or if they begin paying.
6. If no paywall is configured, the feature gets executed immediately without any additional network calls.

Given the low cost nature of how register works, we strongly recommend registering **all core functionality** in order to remotely configure which features you want to gate – **without an app update**.

:::expo
```tsx React Native
import { usePlacement } from "expo-superwall";

// on the welcome screen
function SignUpButton() {
  const { registerPlacement } = usePlacement();

  const handlePress = async () => {
    await registerPlacement({
      placement: 'SignUp',
      feature: () => {
        navigation.beginOnboarding();
      },
    });
  };

  return <Button onPress={handlePress} title="Sign Up" />;
}

function WorkoutButton() {
  const { registerPlacement } = usePlacement();

  const handlePress = async () => {
    await registerPlacement({
      placement: 'StartWorkout',
      feature: () => {
        navigation.startWorkout();
      },
    });
  };

  return <Button onPress={handlePress} title="Start Workout" />;
}
```
:::

### Automatically Registered Placements

The SDK [automatically registers](/docs/sdk/guides/3rd-party-analytics/tracking-analytics) some internal placements which can be used to present paywalls:

### Register. Everything.

To provide your team with ultimate flexibility, we recommend registering *all* of your analytics events, even if you don't pass feature blocks through. This way you can retroactively add a paywall almost anywhere – **without an app update**!

If you're already set up with an analytics provider, you'll typically have an `Analytics.swift` singleton (or similar) to disperse all your events from. Here's how that file might look:

### Getting a presentation result

Use `getPresentationResult(forPlacement:params:)` when you need to ask the SDK what would happen when registering a placement — without actually showing a paywall. Superwall evaluates the placement and its audience filters then returns a `PresentationResult`. You can use this to adapt your app's behavior based on the outcome (such as showing a lock icon next to a pro feature if they aren't subscribed).

In short, this lets you peek at the outcome first and decide how your app should respond: