Pixery Labs

“We realized that implementing and maintaining in-app purchases ourselves had taken too much time and resources. You need dedicated people and when they leave it's difficult to replace and transition that knowledge.”

The Challenge

Staffing changes, platform updates, and unreliable data straining Pixery capacity

Pixery built their own in-app subscription infrastructure for their first app, Funimate. As time went on, their in-house infrastructure became more expensive and time consuming to maintain. Any turnover on their engineering team would set Pixery’s roadmap back 5+ months due to onboarding new hires to the unique requirements of their in-house solution. 

These cycles brought to light the complex nature of subscription infrastructure, normalizing and pipelining data, and the never-ending need to keep pace with Apple and Google changes and edge cases.

The Solution

Cross-platform IAP infrastructure support and a single source of truth for analytics

When Pixery began developing their second app, Impresso, they saw an opportunity to decrease time to market and reduce complexity by implementing RevenueCat. In only 1.5 weeks, Pixery completed their implementation and testing of RevenueCat. Shortly after the successful implementation, they decided to replace Funimate’s subscription infrastructure with RevenueCat as well. 

Using RevenueCat, the Pixery team could focus on adding value to their core features instead of building, maintaining, and updating their IAP infrastructure. RevenueCat allowed Pixery to trust cross-platform event data and leverage out-of-the-box analytics to make more informed product and marketing decisions. Valuable engineering and data science resources moved back to building new apps, better understanding customers, and accelerating Pixery’s growth.

The Results

6,000+ engineering hours saved per year

Before RevenueCat, Pixery needed at least one full-time backend engineer per app along with significant engineering management and CTO hours dedicated to managing their subscription infrastructure. 

RevenueCat ensures Pixery supports the latest platform changes, solves for painful edge cases, and allows Pixery engineers to only interact with one API across Apple and Google – instead of one for each platform. This means no more fire drills with every Google and Apple update. 

20% of capacity freed for data science and backend engineering

Data reliability and aggregation is no longer the bottleneck for gathering insights and making decisions. 

Pixery’s CEO, Kemal Ugur, said, “One of the biggest benefits of RevenueCat is that anyone can do data analysis more frequently or without a data scientist or data analyst.” 

RevenueCat not only provides out-of-the-box charts with key metrics, such as churn and LTV, but it has also eliminated the need to debug code due to data discrepancies and has democratized the data, allowing all teams to make better-informed decisions.

4-6x faster pricing and product experiments

Pixery has realized significant value with RevenueCat’s pre-built integration with Mixpanel. 

“We are able to do testing much faster and more reliably than before now that all testing is on Mixpanel with reliable data events from RevenueCat.”

Pixery went from running tests once per quarter to running several tests a month. In a crucial experiment made possible with RevenueCat data, Pixery tested their subscription term length. While the initial plan was to move away from short-term offerings and offer only longer-term subscriptions, testing uncovered that shorter-term commitments were necessary to retain customers. The decision to offer weekly subscriptions resulted in increased customer conversion and significant churn reduction.