AI apps with subscription

Hey ​@alex-cha-f9e1cd!

Thank you for reaching out, that's a great question!

I'm Tarek from RevenueCat's Developer Support team.

It will depend heavily on your use case, but you RevenueCat can usually take care of most, if not all the monetization aspects, and you optionally can set up your own backend if needed.

Here's how the different pieces fit together:

Entitlements are for access, not counting. A RevenueCat entitlement is a yes/no flag that answers "does this user have Pro?". It's great for unlocking a feature or giving Pro users a higher cap, but it doesn't track something like "7 of 10 free generations used". So don't try to store a usage counter in an entitlement, that isn't what it's for.

The usage count lives server-side. Two options here:

1. RevenueCat Virtual Currencies, if you want a credits or tokens model. RevenueCat tracks the balance for you, grants credits automatically on purchase or subscription, and supports expiring (subscription) vs non-expiring (consumable) credits. Full walkthrough here: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/engineering/how-to-monetize-your-ai-app-with-virtual-currencies/
2. Your own backend, Firebase or Supabase for instance. Keep the counter there and check it on every request, then reset monthly counters on a schedule or when the subscription renews. This is the most common setup.

A couple of links that go deeper:

• Virtual Currencies (the native credits system): https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/offerings/virtual-currency
• For the business side, we wrote about protecting AI margins: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/ai-feature-cost-subscription-app-margins/

Generally speaking you shouldn't trust the client, as it's easily tampered with. Instead, rely on server-side checks, provided either by RevenueCat (see Trusted Entitlements for instance), or your own backend.

I hope that helps! Let me know if there's anything else I can help with.

Best regards,