Stop giving the app store a cut of every subscription

Imagine you sell a subscription, and every single month someone you've never met takes a slice of it. Not once. Forever. For as long as your customer stays.

That's the default deal when you sell subscriptions inside an iPhone or Android app. Apple and Google typically keep between 15% and 30% of every payment that goes through their billing.

For a lot of apps, it's just the cost of doing business.

For a professional tool priced per user, per month, it's a permanent tax on your best customers.

The goal: smooth payments, no permanent cut

NSpectAi is an AI assistant for home inspectors, built by a licensed inspector who knows the job inside out. Inspectors use the iOS and Android apps in the field, and NSpectAi helps turn photos and findings into organized reports.

It's a subscription business. So the question was never whether to charge. It was:

How do we make subscribing easy, without handing over a share of every payment for the life of the customer?

The answer: the app doesn't sell anything

This sounds backwards. It isn't.

• Subscriptions live on the website. Inspectors choose a plan and pay on nspectai.com through Stripe, monthly or yearly, as an individual or for a whole company.
• The apps just sign people in. Open the app, log in with your NSpectAi account, and everything your plan includes is there.
• One account, everywhere. The same subscription works on iPhone, on Android, and in the web dashboard, because billing lives in one place instead of three.
• Team seats that make sense. A company buys seats for its inspectors and manages them from the web. Try doing that with separate app store subscriptions for every person. Actually, don't.

"Is that even allowed?"

Good question. Ask it before you build, not after.

App store rules on outside payments have changed a lot, and they differ by country. In the US, Apple's current guidelines allow apps to point customers to a website to buy. Elsewhere, the rules are stricter and depend on the type of app.

The safest pattern, and the one NSpectAi uses, is the simplest one: nothing is sold inside the app. People subscribe on the website and use what they've paid for in the app. Inspectors find NSpectAi through the website, industry groups, and word of mouth anyway, so the website is a natural front door.

What you give up (because there's always something)

No free lunches here.

Without in-app purchase, there's no one-tap "Subscribe" on the App Store page. So the website signup has to be quick and obvious. And payments, receipts, failed cards, and cancellations become your job instead of Apple's or Google's. Stripe handles most of that well, but it has to be designed and built properly.

That's the trade: a bit more work up front, in exchange for keeping your revenue for as long as your customers stay.

What changed

Every subscription payment now goes to NSpectAi on standard payment processing fees, not an app store commission. The team sets its own pricing, runs its own offers, and sells to multi-inspector companies from one place. Inspectors get one login that works on their phone and their computer.

Smooth for the customer. Fair for the business.

Which is how it should have been all along.

So, what are you stuck on?

Every project in this series started the same way: a short brief and an honest conversation about what it would take.

That's still how it works. Tell us about your project and you'll hear back within one business day. Or see how we approach mobile app development and AI inside your product.