# 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

# Placements

Placements are the building blocks of a campaign. There are two types of placements:

1. **Standard placements:** These are placements you can use which Superwall already tracks and manages for you. Things like app installs, session start, failed transactions and more. We go into more detail about them [here](/docs/dashboard/dashboard-campaigns/campaigns-standard-placements).
2. **Placements you create:** These are app-specific placements you create. They usually correlate to some "pro" action in your app, like "chartsOpened" or "workoutStarted" in a weight lifting app.

At their core, you register placements that, in turn, present paywalls. They can be as simple as that, or you can combine them with [audiences](/docs/dashboard/dashboard-campaigns/campaigns-audience) to create specific filtering rules to control paywall presentations, create holdouts and more.

To see how they work with our SDK, check out the [docs](/docs/sdk/quickstart/feature-gating). For a quick example, here's what it looks like on iOS:

```swift
Superwall.shared.register(placement: "caffeineLogged") {
  // Action to take if they are on a paid plan
}
```

**Don't be shy about adding placements.** If you think you *might* want to use a certain feature in your app with a placement — do it now. You can add the placement, and keep it paused. Then, if you ever want to feature-gate that particular flow, you can enable it. No app update required.

In short, add placements for everything you want to feature gate, and things you may *want* to in the future.

> **Tip:** If a campaign's paywall needs to be ready immediately, such as during onboarding or on first app launch, use [Priority Placements](/docs/dashboard/dashboard-campaigns/campaigns-placements-prioritized) to preload that campaign before the rest of your app's campaigns.

### Placement parameters

Placement parameters let you attach contextual data when registering a placement ([SDK docs](/docs/sdk/quickstart/feature-gating)). That data travels with the placement into the dashboard so you can branch logic or personalize the experience without shipping new app code.

Once parameters arrive in the dashboard, you can:

* Reference them in [audience filters](/docs/dashboard/dashboard-campaigns/campaigns-audience#using-user-properties-or-placement-parameters) to decide which users should see a paywall, holdout, or rule group.
* Surface them in the paywall editor as custom variables to drive copy, images, or logic. See [Using Placement Parameters](/docs/using-placement-parameters) for templating examples.
* Pass them along to analytics exports or downstream workflows so your broader stack understands the same context the campaign used.

### The placements interface

Under the placements section, you can:

* **Add** new placements.
* **Pause** running placements.
* **Delete** existing placements.

#### Adding a placement

To add a placement, **click** the "+" button in the top-right side of the placements section:

![](https://json-ld-superwall-docs-staging.staffbar.workers.dev/docs/images/campaigns-add-placement-button.png)

A modal will appear, and from there you can add a placement via two different means:

1. **Use an existing Superwall event:** Superwall automatically manages several events that can be used as placements. For example, the `survey_response` event could be used to show an entirely different paywall with a discounted offering if a user responded with a particular answer. See the [list](/docs/dashboard/dashboard-campaigns/campaigns-standard-placements) of the Superwall-managed events to learn more.

![](https://json-ld-superwall-docs-staging.staffbar.workers.dev/docs/images/campaigns-view-existing-events.png)

2. **Create your own, app-specific placement:** Here, you type in whatever event you want to use as a placement in your own app. In a caffeine tracking app, one of them might be when a user logs caffeine — something like `caffeineLogged`.

Either way, once you've selected one from our existing events or typed in your own, **click** on **Add Event** to associate the placement to your campaign:

![](https://json-ld-superwall-docs-staging.staffbar.workers.dev/docs/images/campaigns-add-event.png)

<br />

> **Tip:** You can also add placements "on the fly" by invoking `register(placement:"myNewPlacement")`. If
> the placement you pass doesn't exist for a campaign, Superwall will automatically add it.

### Basic example of placement usage

Consider a caffeine tracking app. At a basic level, we want a paywall to show when a user tries to log caffeine, and they are not on a "pro" plan:

#### Step One: Make the placement

We'd make a placement called `caffeineLogged` inside a campaign:

![](https://json-ld-superwall-docs-staging.staffbar.workers.dev/docs/images/campaigns-add-placement.png)

#### Step Two: Assign a paywall

You can use the same paywall across different campaigns, placements, filters and more. In our case, we have one that we to show. So, since this campaign has a paywall linked to it already — we are good to go:

![](https://json-ld-superwall-docs-staging.staffbar.workers.dev/docs/images/campaigns-default-paywall.png)

#### Step Three: Register inside our app

Inside our caffeine tracking app, when the user taps a button to log caffeine, we would register the `caffeineLogged` event. This way, if the user is pro, the closure is called and the interface to log caffeine is shown. If they are not pro, then our paywall will show:

```swift
Button("Log") {
    Superwall.shared.register(placement: "caffeineLogged") {
        presentLogCaffeine.toggle()
    }
}
```

And that's it!

> **Tip:** Remember, you can pause placements at any point. So here, if you wanted to run a campaign where
> logging caffeine was free for a weekend — no update would be required. Just tell your users, and
> pause the placement in your Superwall dashboard. No app update required.

There are also several out-of-the box placements you can use, learn more about standard placements [here](/docs/dashboard/dashboard-campaigns/campaigns-standard-placements).