The Idea: In 2017, Jacob Eiting and Miguel Carrascosa were both building subscription apps and running into the exact same wall - managing subscriptions across iOS and Android was a nightmare of duplicated logic, receipt validation bugs, and zero visibility into what was actually happening with your revenue. Every app developer was solving the same problem from scratch, badly, and then rebuilding it again when the next platform update broke everything. Jacob and Miguel figured there had to be a better way: one SDK to handle all of it, and a clean dashboard that gave you the subscription data your business actually needed. They quit their jobs, moved fast, and launched. This was the beginning of RevenueCat.
The Execution:
- 2018: Jacob and Miguel launch RevenueCat out of Y Combinator with a simple pitch - one SDK, all platforms, never think about subscriptions again. Early adopters immediately see the value.
- 2019: The product gains serious traction among indie developers and small studios. RevenueCat starts tracking real money - millions in developer revenue flowing through the platform - validating that the market is bigger than it looked.
- 2021: RevenueCat raises a $40M Series B led by Index Ventures. The company has now processed over $1 billion in app revenue and is used by thousands of apps globally.
- 2022: RevenueCat launches Paywalls - remotely configurable, A/B-testable subscription screens that developers can ship without an app update. It turns RevenueCat from infrastructure into a growth tool.
- 2023: The platform crosses $5 billion in tracked app revenue, with over 30,000 apps in the ecosystem. RevenueCat becomes the de facto standard for mobile subscription infrastructure.
- 2024: RevenueCat surpasses $7 billion in total app revenue tracked across its platform. The company still has no traditional outbound sales team - almost all growth is product-led.
- 2025: RevenueCat expands beyond mobile to power web subscriptions, becoming the unified subscription layer across every surface where developers sell.
The lesson? The best developer tools win by making a painful problem completely invisible. Jacob and Miguel didn't build RevenueCat because subscriptions were a sexy market - they built it because they personally felt the pain and knew every other developer did too. If you find yourself solving the same problem you see everyone around you struggling with, that's not a coincidence. That's a company.