# 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

# Making Purchases

Purchase any StoreKit product easily, with or without a paywall.

Making purchases of a consumable, non-consumable or subscription product in Superwall takes only one line. You can use this whether or not you are using Superwall's paywalls:

```swift
let result = await Superwall.shared.purchase(product)
```

This method takes a `StoreProduct` and returns a `PurchaseResult` so you can take action on the result. Here's an example from our demo app, [Caffeine Pal](https://github.com/superwall/CaffeinePal/blob/using-superwall-sdk/Caffeine%20Pal/Store%20and%20Models/CaffeineStore.swift#L121):

> **Warning:** `Superwall.shared.purchase(product)` is for StoreKit-backed products. For Custom Store Products on a paywall, handle the purchase in your [`PurchaseController`](/docs/ios/sdk-reference/PurchaseController) using `product.productIdentifier`. See [Custom Store Products](/docs/ios/guides/custom-store-products).

```swift
func purchase(_ product: StoreProduct) async throws {
    let result = await Superwall.shared.purchase(product)
    
    switch result {
    case .cancelled:
        throw CaffeinePalStoreFrontError.cancelled
    case .purchased:
        // In `handleSuperwallEvent` delegate method, we'll check if an espresso recipe was
        // Purchased and if it was, we'll add it to the purchased drinks set.
        print("Purchased product \(product.productIdentifier)")
    case .pending:
        throw CaffeinePalStoreFrontError.pending
    case .failed(let error):
        throw error
    }
}
```

> **Note:** For the SDK reference, check out this [page](/docs/ios/guides/advanced/direct-purchasing).

The flow looks like this:

1. Fetch your products.
2. Call `purchase` on any of them.
3. Respond to the result.

Here's an example:

### Fetch products

A `StoreProduct` can be fetched using its corresponding identifier from App Store Connect or a [StoreKit Configuration File](/docs/ios/guides/testing-purchases). Custom Store Products are loaded from paywalls and are not fetched with `products(for:)`. For example, `subscription.caffeinePalPro.monthly` here:

![](https://963b3ab1-superwall-docs-staging.staffbar.workers.dev/docs/images/dp_product_id.jpeg)

That product could be fetched like so:

```swift
let caffeineSub = await Superwall.shared.products(for: Set(["subscription.caffeinePalPro.monthly"]))
```

### Call purchase

Now, simply call `purchase`:

```swift
let result = await Superwall.shared.purchase(caffeineSub)
```

### Respond to result

Finally, respond to the result:

```swift
switch result {
case .cancelled:
    // user cancelled the purchase flow
case .purchased:
    // Purchase completed
case .pending:
    // Purchase in flight
case .failed(let error):
    // Couldn't purchase, check out the error
}
```

There are a number of additional ways to respond to a purchase outside of this `result`, depending on how the product was purchased (for example, within a paywall). For examples, see this [doc](/docs/ios/guides/advanced/viewing-purchased-products).