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Question

Free subscriptions for Kickstarter backers

  • 5 July 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 22 views

I’m looking at integrating RevenueCat into a newly released Flutter (Android only at the moment) app that doesn’t currently have subscriptions.

The app was Kickstarted, and one of the reward levels for backers is to have a subscription for 1 year for free, with the next level being free ongoing annual subscription for the life of the app.

Is it possible to have these subscriptions automatically applied to a list of email addresses through RevenueCat, or is that something that would need to be initiated on the Play Store side?

If the latter, do you know what the best practice to achieve that is? Ideally without requiring payment card details (though from my searches it looks like that might be unavoidable).

 

Thanks for any help you can give!

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2 replies

joan-cardona
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Hi @jase,

I see 2 ways of doing it:

  • Create promotional codes in Play Store, which has the advantage that you can set up a recurrent subscription after the 1 year for free
  • Grant a year entitlement from RevenueCat. They are very flexible and easy to use, you can even do it from our REST API and you can manage it as you wish. This won’t require to set up any payment method for your users.

Both options seems to fit right on your case, it will depend on what’s your preference and what do you want to do with these users after the 1 year for free.

I hope this helps!

Joan.
J
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Thanks for the reply!

I had an idea in the interim that I could use an in-app purchase for the lifetime access, distribute promo codes for that and then delete the in-app purchase product on the Play Store side once the promo codes have been used. This seems messy and I’m not sure of the implications of deleting a claimed product to the RC, or even the Play Store side. What do you think?

With the promo codes idea, the page you linked says

Subscription promo codes provide users with a trial of between 3 and 90 days free of charge.

so it looks like a 1 year promo code is not possible?

For the RC granted entitlement idea, it looks like the user needs to exist in RC already for it to work. Is this correct?

 

 

Or what about this idea, because we don’t want to expose the lifetime product as an offering.

Is it possible to have a product that only exists in RC - a lifetime access product - and have that managed through RC using a granted entitlement? This product would not be part of any offering.

Then have the normal subscriptions (1, 3 and 12 month) configured and managed the normal way in Play Store and RC.

 

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