# 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

# Priority Placements

Preload your most important campaign's paywalls before the rest of your app's campaigns.

By default, Superwall's SDK preloads every paywall attached to your campaigns when the app launches. For most apps, this works seamlessly. But if you have a paywall that needs to appear *immediately* — like an onboarding paywall shown right at first launch — you can tell the SDK to preload that campaign's paywalls first.

That's what **Priority Placements** do. This feature is also referred to as **prioritized placements** or **prioritized campaign preloading**. When you mark a campaign as prioritized, the SDK fetches and caches that campaign's paywalls before anything else. Other campaign paywalls are still preloaded afterward in the background.

> **Note:** Only **one campaign per app** can be prioritized at a time. If you prioritize a new campaign, the previously prioritized one is automatically deprioritized.

## When to use it

Prioritizing a campaign is most useful when:

* **You show a paywall on first launch or during onboarding** — the paywall needs to be ready the moment the user hits the placement, with zero loading delay.
* **A placement is triggered very early in a session** — such as `session_start` or `app_open` — and you want to guarantee the paywall appears instantly.
* **You have many campaigns** and want to ensure one specific campaign's paywalls take precedence during preloading.

If your app only has a few campaigns, preloading happens quickly enough that you likely won't need this. It's most impactful when you have several campaigns and want to control the order they load.

## How to prioritize a campaign

In the campaign editor, look for the **flag icon** next to the **Placements** header:

![](https://superwall.com/docs/images/campaigns-prioritize-placements.png)

Click the flag to prioritize the campaign. The flag turns green to indicate the campaign is now prioritized. The dashboard describes this action as prioritizing campaign preloading.

To deprioritize, click the green flag again — it will revert to its default state.

### Switching between campaigns

If another campaign is already prioritized and you click the flag on a different campaign, a confirmation dialog will appear:

> **Switch prioritized campaign?**
> "\[Other campaign name]" is currently prioritized. Only one campaign can be prioritized at a time. Switching will deprioritize it.

Confirm to switch, or cancel to keep the current priority.

## How it works under the hood

When the SDK fetches its configuration and sees a prioritized campaign:

1. **Phase 1 — Prioritized preload:** The SDK identifies all paywalls belonging to the prioritized campaign and preloads them first.
2. **Phase 2 — Remaining preload:** After a 5-second delay, the SDK preloads all remaining campaign paywalls in the background.

This two-phase approach ensures the most important paywalls are cached and ready before others, without skipping preloading for the rest of your campaigns. The prioritized campaign's paywalls will be ready to present with no loading time, while other paywalls continue loading in the background.

> **Tip:** Prioritization only affects *preload order* — it does not change how placements, audiences, or experiments work. Your campaign logic stays exactly the same.

## SDK version requirements

Priority Placements require the following minimum SDK versions:

| SDK          | Minimum version     | Notes                                                                                                       |
| ------------ | ------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| iOS          | **4.14.0**          | Full support.                                                                                               |
| Android      | **2.7.10**          | Full support.                                                                                               |
| Flutter      | **2.4.12**          | Full support via bundled iOS SDK 4.14.2 and Android SDK 2.7.11. iOS-only support started in Flutter 2.4.11. |
| Expo         | **1.0.11**          | Full support via bundled iOS SDK 4.14.1 and Android SDK 2.7.11. iOS-only support started in Expo 1.0.8.     |
| React Native | *Not yet supported* | The current React Native SDK bundles native SDK versions that predate prioritized campaign preloading.      |

> **Note:** Priority Placements are fully backward-compatible. Older SDK versions ignore the prioritization flag and preload all paywalls in the default order.