Hey @lfkwtz!
Of course- it sounds like you want to be sure existing customers retain access to features, while new customers have to buy a subscription for certain features. There are a couple of ways you could accomplish this:
1) Create each user in RevenueCat, based on your account system identifiers. After creating the existing users, you can grant them each a promotional entitlement for lifetime access (say for an entitlement called ‘legacy_user’, or something like that). Then, when you check entitlements from our SDK, you’ll be able to identify features that a user should have based on that entitlement. You can read more about this in our API docs here:
https://www.revenuecat.com/reference/subscribers
https://www.revenuecat.com/reference/grant-a-promotional-entitlement
2) If you’re using iOS, you can check when the user downloaded the app or which version they downloaded, and grant them access to features client-side based on that value. We have a blog post for this here: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/engineering/converting-a-paid-ios-app-to-subscriptions/
Thanks Cody. The iOS solution is so simple - wish there was something similar for Android.
So is there any way for me to tie a user’s Google Play account back to them? If I’m understanding correctly - I could essentially give a lifetime subscription to every email address in my database of users who have downloaded the app and signed up (therefore I know they at once paid for the app). But - if an Android user ever wanted to make a new login on my app, I would have no way to automatically tie their account back as a previously paying customer - correct?
Or maybe I’m understanding incorrectly on the Google Play piece. I imagine there is some type of identifier that RevenueCat receives that ties a user back to their Google account - yes?