# 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

# Advanced Purchasing

If you need fine-grain control over the purchasing pipeline, use a purchase controller to manually handle purchases and subscription status.

> **Warning:** Using a `PurchaseController` is only recommended for **advanced** use cases. By default, Superwall handles all
> subscription-related logic and purchasing operations for you out of the box.

By default, Superwall handles basic subscription-related logic for you:

1. **Purchasing**: When the user initiates a checkout on a paywall.
2. **Restoring**: When the user restores previously purchased products.
3. **Subscription Status**: When the user's subscription status changes to active or expired (by checking the local receipt).

However, if you want more control, you can pass in a `PurchaseController` when configuring the SDK via `configure(apiKey:purchaseController:options:)` and manually set `Superwall.shared.subscriptionStatus` to take over this responsibility.

On iOS, starting in `4.15.0`, a `PurchaseController` is also how you handle custom products attached to Superwall paywalls. Those products are not purchased with StoreKit, so your controller must route them through your own billing system. See [Custom Store Products](/docs/ios/guides/custom-store-products) for the full iOS setup.

### Step 1: Creating a `PurchaseController`

A `PurchaseController` handles purchasing and restoring via protocol methods that you implement.

:::expo
```typescript React Native
export class MyPurchaseController extends PurchaseController {
  // 1
  async purchaseFromAppStore(productId: string): Promise<PurchaseResult> {
    // TODO
    // ----
    // Purchase via StoreKit, RevenueCat, Qonversion or however
    // you like and return a valid PurchaseResult
  }

  async purchaseFromGooglePlay(
    productId: string,
    basePlanId?: string,
    offerId?: string
  ): Promise<PurchaseResult> {
    // TODO
    // ----
    // Purchase via Google Billing, RevenueCat, Qonversion or however
    // you like and return a valid PurchaseResult
  }

  // 2
  async restorePurchases(): Promise<RestorationResult> {
    // TODO
    // ----
    // Restore purchases and return true if successful.
  }
}
```
:::

Here’s what each method is responsible for:

1. Purchasing a given product. In here, enter your code that you use to purchase a product. Then, return the result of the purchase as a `PurchaseResult`. For Flutter, this is separated into purchasing from the App Store and Google Play. This is an enum that contains the following cases, all of which must be handled:
   1. `.cancelled`: The purchase was cancelled.
   2. `.purchased`: The product was purchased.
   3. `.pending`: The purchase is pending/deferred and requires action from the developer.
   4. `.failed(Error)`: The purchase failed for a reason other than the user cancelling or the payment pending.
2. Restoring purchases. Here, you restore purchases and return a `RestorationResult` indicating whether the restoration was successful or not. If it was, return `.restore`, or `failed` along with the error reason.

### Step 2: Configuring the SDK With Your `PurchaseController`

Pass your purchase controller to the `configure(apiKey:purchaseController:options:)` method:

:::expo
```typescript React Native
export default function App() {
  React.useEffect(() => {
    const apiKey = Platform.OS === "ios" ? "MY_IOS_API_KEY" : "MY_ANDROID_API_KEY"
    const purchaseController = new MyPurchaseController()
    Superwall.configure({
      apiKey: apiKey,
      purchaseController: purchaseController,
    })
  }, [])
}
```
:::

### Step 3: Keeping `subscriptionStatus` Up-To-Date

You **must** set `Superwall.shared.subscriptionStatus` every time the user's subscription status changes, otherwise the SDK won't know who to show a paywall to. This is an enum that has three possible cases:

1. **`.unknown`*&#x2A;: This is the default value. In this state, paywalls will not show and their presentation will be &#x2A;**automatically delayed*** until `subscriptionStatus` changes to a different value.
2. **`.active(let entitlements)`**: Indicates that the user has an active entitlement. Paywalls will not show in this state unless you remotely set the paywall to ignore subscription status. A user can have one or more active entitlement.
3. **`.inactive`**: Indicates that the user doesn't have an active entitlement. Paywalls can show in this state.

Here's how you might do this:

:::expo
```typescript React Native
// When a subscription is purchased, restored, validated, expired, etc...
myService.addSubscriptionStatusListener((subscriptionInfo: SubscriptionInfo) => {
  const entitlements = Object.keys(subscriptionInfo.entitlements.active).map((id) => ({
    id,
  }))
  if (entitlements.length === 0) {
    Superwall.shared.setSubscriptionStatus(SubscriptionStatus.Inactive())
  } else {
    Superwall.shared.setSubscriptionStatus(
      SubscriptionStatus.Active(entitlements.map((id) => new Entitlement(id)))
    )
  }
})
```
:::

<br />

> **Note:** `subscriptionStatus` is cached between app launches

### Listening for subscription status changes

If you need a simple way to observe when a user's subscription status changes, on iOS you can use the `Publisher` for it. Here's an example:

:::expo
```typescript React Native
Superwall.shared.subscriptionStatusEmitter.addListener("change", (status) => {
  switch (status.status) {
    case "ACTIVE":
      break
    default:
      break
  }
})
```
:::

You can do similar tasks with the `SuperwallDelegate`, such as [viewing which product was purchased from a paywall](/docs/sdk/guides/3rd-party-analytics#using-events-to-see-purchased-products).

### Product Overrides

> **Note:** Product overrides allow you to dynamically substitute products on paywalls without modifying the paywall design in the Superwall dashboard.

When using a `PurchaseController`, you may want to override specific products shown on your paywalls. This is useful for:

* A/B testing different subscription tiers
* Showing region-specific products
* Dynamically changing products based on user segments
* Testing promotional pricing without modifying paywalls

**How Product Overrides Work:**

1. Product names (e.g., "primary", "secondary") must match exactly as defined in the Superwall dashboard's Paywall Editor
2. The SDK substitutes the original product IDs with your override IDs before fetching from the App Store
3. The paywall maintains its visual design while showing the substituted products
4. Your `PurchaseController` will receive the overridden products when `purchase(product:)` is called

> **Warning:** Product overrides only affect the products shown on paywalls. They don't change your subscription logic or entitlement validation.