StoreKit With and Without RevenueCat

Tyler Hall, an experienced developer with extensive expertise in Apple's StoreKit since its inception, discusses his experience implementing subscriptions with and without RevenueCat, highlighting the challenges and efficiencies of both approaches. He describes how building an app's StoreKit logic took roughly two full-time weeks due to his background and the goal of making the system flexible for future updates, while server-side validation was managed by a single NodeJS engineer. Hall emphasizes the complexities of Apple's infrastructure and documentation, recounting how his prior code reuse saved time, but starting from scratch would be daunting due to undocumented quirks. He explains that simple integrations like Slack notifications are quick, but deeper integrations or data analysis tools could be time-consuming without existing solutions. Hall advocates for using RevenueCat, noting its cost-effectiveness, time savings, and domain expertise compared to building from scratch—illustrated by his own quick integration of RevenueCat into a personal project, which allowed him to complete a financial transaction setup in under 90 minutes.