After a year of running creator/affiliate campaigns for subscription apps on RevenueCat, here is the architecture that actually holds up in production. Posting it as a conversation because the affiliate threads here keep getting auto-closed while the same questions keep coming back.
1. Attribution: typed codes as subscriber attributes. Let fans type the creator’s code into the app (a plain text field), then set it as a subscriber attribute before the purchase: Purchases.shared.attribution.setAttributes(["affiliate_code": code]). Typed codes work cross-platform, survive the App Store install gap, and need no deep links or fingerprinting.
2. Revenue: webhooks carry the attribute. Point a RevenueCat webhook at your backend — every INITIAL_PURCHASE, RENEWAL and CANCELLATION event arrives with subscriber attributes attached, so each purchase and every renewal credits the right creator. That is the whole trick: RevenueCat already joins the two halves for you.
3. Don’t build attribution on Apple Offer Codes. Apple caps you at 10 active offers per subscription and StoreKit doesn’t return the custom code string — so per-creator offer codes don’t scale (this exact wall comes up in several closed threads here). If you want a discount incentive, pair one shared offer with the typed code; attribute via the code, discount via the offer.
4. Comped creator access: promotional entitlements. If creators get the app free, grant a promotional entitlement via the RevenueCat REST API instead of burning store codes — instant, cross-platform, revocable, and it never pollutes revenue metrics.
5. The hard 20% nobody budgets for: self-referral/install fraud (affiliates can generate their own installs), refunds (hold commissions ~30 days before they become payable), currency conversion, and actually paying people (Stripe Connect onboarding, payout minimums, country coverage). This is where DIY estimates blow up 5–10x.
Disclosure: I build InfluTo (influ.to), a platform that runs exactly this stack on top of RevenueCat — open-source SDKs, and an MCP server so AI coding agents can do the integration end to end. Insert Affiliate is another product in this space that RevenueCat staff have recommended here before. And honestly: a v1 of steps 1–2 plus a spreadsheet gets you surprisingly far with a handful of creators.
Happy to go deeper on any of the mechanics — attribution edge cases, which webhook events matter, fraud patterns we’ve seen in the wild.
