Subscription Plan Change Automatically

Hi,

Thanks for reaching out. I’m happy to help!

This isn’t actually a bug with RevenueCat. From looking at the customer history, the user originally started a free trial on your weekly plan, and then later changed their renewal preference to the yearly plan. When this happens, Apple will transition the user into the yearly subscription once the trial ends, instead of continuing them on the weekly plan. That’s why you’re seeing the trial begin on the $4.99 product, but the first paid renewal happen on the $199 yearly product.

Apple lets subscribers upgrade, downgrade, or crossgrade within the same subscription group at any time. When a subscriber changes their preference:

• The trial still runs on the original product they started with.

• At the end of that trial period, the new product they switched to is what renews.

• This all happens automatically through App Store billing.

You can read more about this in our docs here.

Subscribers can change their plan themselves by going to their device Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions, selecting your app, and choosing a different subscription. This is exactly what happened in the examples you shared.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions. I’m happy to assist!

Best,

Hussain

Hi,

Please see attached screenshot. user got access of weekly product for 3 times trial period and that product converted to $199 yearly product and charged for 3 times. We have seen lot of issues like this and reported to apple too.

Thanks

Hi,

Thanks for the follow up. To assist you further can you DM me the app user id for the customer profile picture referenced in the previous post? Do send me a DM and not share the app user id publicly on this post as this is a public forum.

Best,

Hussain

Hi,

Thanks for sharing the follow-up details and the screenshot. I had a chance to look into the specific customer profile you referenced. This customer profile actually has 3 distinct receipts attached to it, which explains why they were able to start three separate trial periods on the same weekly product. Each of these receipts comes from a different Apple account, which means the user essentially created multiple accounts in order to take advantage of the trial more than once. Apple allows a free trial per Apple ID, so when a customer switches to a new account, they can technically start a fresh trial again.

Because trials and billing behavior are entirely managed by the App Store, there’s no way for RevenueCat to block or prevent a user from creating multiple Apple IDs and redeeming multiple trials. This is ultimately an App Store policy/limitation, and unfortunately it’s outside of our control.

Some developers choose to layer on additional logic in their apps (e.g., gating features or applying device-level checks) to discourage repeat trials, but this has to be implemented app-side rather than through RevenueCat.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions. I’m happy to help.

Best,

Hussain

Hi,

Can you please help us to reach out to apple team for this? We did deep investigation and this comes to know that this type of purchases are done by Vietnam spammers. They targeted our another app in last 3 days by starting trial of monthly product and switching to yearly and asking for refunds. We tried to reach out to email support for subscription team but they are just sending common replies. We need to escalate this to high authorities in the apple. Can revenuecat team please help us in it?

Thanks

Hi, I apologize for the delay in us responding to your response. We do not exactly have a direct contact on the Apple side that we can put you in touch with. Were you able to get a more helpful response from them in the last few days?