We have three different forms of distribution for our SaaS (Web, Android and iOS) all currently reviewed and in-store in their free form ($0).
Our business model is focussed around a single subscription across all platforms and was hoping to use our existing system of Stripe > Webhook to updates all services of a users status.
Heads down in the development has overlooked the very confusing, constantly changing and expensive (70/30 split!) guidelines that Apple publishes.
We’ve developed blindly as looking at apps like Dropbox and many others offer the same subscription / account across all platforms.
My questions is how are they doing it? IAP? External subscription? From the guidelines you are not allowed to link to a ‘Buy / Subscribe’ button.
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They are using the IAP systems. I’ve developed about 5 paid apps for other companies and enterprise and what it comes down to is that 30% is your gateway to get downloads. I’ve seen people classify it as a marketing expense. It just becomes part of overhead!
Just be careful and smart, if you look at the application 1Password they really made their customers angry. They released 2 versions of the app, charged the same price, but 1 version was via the app store, and the other you could download from their website. What happened was the app store version had different features and when people wanted refunds or to change it, they weren’t able to because the company would have lost the 30% and didn’t handle it well.
There isn’t a way to go around that 30%. So if I were you guys, I would just deal with it. Don’t mean to sound harsh but it’s either take a 30% cut OR not sell anything at all! That’s the mind set you’ll have to work with.
Many thanks for your help.
My question was more based around how are they interconnecting payment systems to give different user permissions. Does apple have a webhook following payment in order to update my backend?
Simon
Great question, you’ll have to handle it yourself. We did consumables and we wanted to obviously track how many via iOS and Android we got. I haven’t done it with Cordova/Phonegap but if you look at the in app purchase plugins it should return a type of transaction number, and inside iOS you can ping that to the apple servers based off their device to make sure that’s all current. Then in your database you would just sync that together. Apple allows in app purchases to be ‘reinstated’. So if someone lost their device and got a new one, as long as they are signed in with the same apple ID you just have to call a function that pulls the purchases and runs those success callbacks. I can’t remember how it works with android, i know they’ve recently changed it.
I hope that helps you get going in the right direction, it definitely can be kind of hard to handle it all especially across different platforms. There are some good resources online as well that are platform specific but their implementation may help you decide exactly how you want to manage those.
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I’m sorry but what plugin are you mentioning here?
Well you have a three subscriptions for SaaS. You want to know about the IAP then you should follow this link below:- https://www.binadox.com/saas-managing-demo/