I'm shipping a subscription-based React Native app and went through the

"do I use RevenueCat or roll my own?" question that probably every solo

RN dev hits. I ended up rolling my own, ran into more edge cases than I

expected, and eventually pulled the working backend into an MIT package.

Sharing the post-mortem in case it saves someone else the same weeks.

Why not RevenueCat

To be clear — RevenueCat is good. For a lot of apps it's the right call.

Two things pushed me off it:

Revenue share scales with you. 1% after $2.5K MRR is fair pricing, but it's a surface I want to own for the lifetime of the product, not rent.

My subscription state lives in their DB. I still need to mirror "user X is subscribed" into my own Postgres to join with the rest of my data, which means I'm running a webhook handler from them either way. Felt like I was paying to add a hop.

So I started writing it myself.…