5 Best Tools to Sell iOS Apps Outside the App Store (Ranked by Fee and Setup Time)
Summary
- The Epic v. Apple ruling lets iOS developers bypass Apple's 30% commission, unlocking a $150B+ market by selling directly to users in the US.
- When choosing a direct billing tool, evaluate the total cost beyond processing fees, including engineering time and Merchant of Record (MoR) responsibilities for tax and fraud.
- DIY solutions like Stripe appear cheap at 2.9%, but the true cost often exceeds 6-10% once you factor in engineering, compliance, and support overhead.
- For scaling subscription or gaming apps, a mobile-first SDK like Allocents provides a native checkout experience and handles MoR duties, letting you capture up to 25% more revenue with a 15-minute setup.
The April 2025 Epic v. Apple ruling changed everything. A federal court permanently barred Apple from forcing developers to use its In-App Purchase (IAP) system in the US — unlocking an estimated $150B+ in annual IAP volume for the first time. If you're an iOS developer, that 30% Apple tax is no longer a given.
But here's the thing: the r/iOSProgramming community is already buzzing with confusion. Developers are asking the exact right questions — "As in this takes the place of Apple in-app purchases and you don't lose the 30%?" — but struggling to cut through the noise and compare their options side-by-side. Others have made the classic mistake: "Some teams try 3 things in week 1, then spend months cleaning it up."
This guide is for developers who want to move fast and move smart. We compare the 5 best tools to sell outside the App Store, ranked across four dimensions that actually matter:
- Effective Fee Rate — what percentage of your revenue do you actually keep?
- Integration Time — how many engineering hours to go live?
- Merchant of Record (MoR) Coverage — who handles global sales tax, fraud, and chargebacks?
- Native UI Quality — how seamless is the checkout for your users? A clunky web view kills conversion.
The verdict upfront: Gumroad wins for zero-code indie apps, Stripe DIY wins for large teams with full engineering bandwidth, and Allocents is the clear winner for $500K+ ARR subscription and gaming apps that need a native-feeling paywall without rebuilding billing infrastructure from scratch.
Quick Comparison: The Top 5 Tools at a Glance
| Tool | Effective Fee Rate | Integration Time | Merchant of Record | Native UI Quality | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Allocents | 5% + 50¢ (or 0.5% BYOS) | ~15 minutes | ✅ Full (or Dev w/ BYOS) | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | $500K+ ARR Subscription & Gaming Apps |
| Paddle | ~5–10% | 1–3 days | ✅ Full | ⭐⭐⭐ | Mid-size SaaS & App Developers |
| Gumroad | 8.5% + 30¢ | Immediate | ✅ Full | ⭐⭐ | Indie Devs & No-Code Creators |
| Stripe DIY | 2.9% + 30¢ + Dev Costs | 1+ week | ❌ Developer is MoR | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (if you build it) | Large Teams with Full Engineering Bandwidth |
| RevenueCat + Custom | ~3–5% + Dev Costs | 3–5 days | ❌ Developer is MoR | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (if you build it) | Teams Needing Advanced Multi-platform Subscription Logic |
1. Allocents — Best for High-Growth Mobile Apps ($500K+ ARR)
Best For: Mobile gaming studios (consumables: coins, gems) and subscription apps (fitness, media, productivity, dating) with $500K–$20M+ ARR that need a native-feeling paywall without rebuilding their billing stack.
| Fee Rate | 5% + 50¢ per transaction (Full MoR) or 0.5% on migrated revenue (BYOS) |
| Integration Time | ~15 minutes |
| Merchant of Record | ✅ Full (Allocents Billing) / ❌ Developer (BYOS) |
| Native UI Quality | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
Allocents was built by mobile billing experts who understand StoreKit from the inside out. It's the only tool on this list purpose-built for the post-Epic ruling landscape.
The core differentiator is a single SDK (Swift/SwiftUI, Kotlin, Flutter, React Native) that handles everything other setups need multiple services for. Instead of stitching together RevenueCat for subscription logic + Stripe for payments + a tax service for compliance, Allocents ships it all in one 15-minute integration.
Key features include:
- Sign Up & Save paywalls — users choose between paying via the App Store or direct billing at a discount, side by side
- Switch & Save campaigns — automatically nudge existing StoreKit subscribers to migrate to direct billing
- Native web checkout with Apple Pay and Google Pay built in
- Smart cancellation flows — offer discounts or pause options to retain churning users
- Automatic StoreKit product sync from App Store Connect — no double-managing products across platforms
- Gradual rollout — start with 10% of your users, scale up, and roll back instantly if needed
- Built-in A/B testing for discounts, copy, and timing
- Jurisdiction-aware routing — only shows direct payment options where legally compliant
On the full Allocents Billing plan at 5% + 50¢, they act as a complete Merchant of Record across 190+ countries — handling payments, tax remittance, chargebacks, fraud protection, refunds, and customer support. That's Apple-grade billing infrastructure at a fraction of Apple's price.
Already have Stripe? The Bring Your Own Stripe (BYOS) plan lets you plug in your existing Stripe account and use Allocents's SDK and migration flows for just 0.5% of migrated revenue — you handle MoR responsibilities, Allocents handles the checkout experience and migration intelligence.
Bottom line: Allocents is the fastest, cleanest way for an established iOS business to capture 20–25% more net revenue without a billing rebuild. The BYOS option is especially compelling for teams that already have Stripe and in-house compliance handled.
➡️ Explore Allocents Billing | Check out the BYOS plan
2. Paddle — Best for Mid-Size SaaS and App Developers
Best For: SaaS and app developers who want a mature, all-in-one MoR platform and are comfortable trading slightly higher fees for a broad feature set.
| Fee Rate | ~5% + 50¢ (varies by volume) |
| Integration Time | 1–3 days |
| Merchant of Record | ✅ Full |
| Native UI Quality | ⭐⭐⭐ |
Paddle is a well-established Merchant of Record platform that abstracts away global tax compliance, fraud, and chargebacks — much like Allocents. It's a solid, battle-tested option with a broad customer base across SaaS and digital products.
Where Paddle falls short for iOS developers is its mobile-native experience. Paddle was primarily designed with web SaaS in mind, so achieving a truly seamless, native-feeling in-app checkout requires more custom work than a mobile-first SDK. You'll likely be presenting a web view rather than a fluid SwiftUI paywall, which can hurt conversion on mobile. Integration is also more involved — expect to spend 1–3 days wiring things up, compared to Allocents's 15-minute drop-in.
Fee-wise, Paddle's pricing is competitive at ~5% + 50¢ but can vary based on volume and product type. For apps with complex consumable purchases (like in-game currency), the per-transaction structure may add up quickly.
Bottom line: Paddle is a reliable choice if you're already a SaaS team moving into mobile, or if you need broad platform support and MoR coverage. If you're mobile-first and prioritizing conversion, a purpose-built mobile SDK will serve you better.
3. Gumroad — Best for Indie Devs and Zero-Code Creators
Best For: Indie developers, solopreneurs, and creators selling one-off digital products or simple apps with minimal technical setup.
| Fee Rate | 8.5% + 30¢ (decreases with lifetime sales volume) |
| Integration Time | Immediate |
| Merchant of Record | ✅ Full |
| Native UI Quality | ⭐⭐ |
Gumroad is the simplest way to start selling. You create a product page, share a link, and transactions start flowing. It handles payments, tax, and compliance globally — no engineering required. For an indie dev who wants to validate an idea or sell a niche utility app without writing a single line of billing code, Gumroad is genuinely the best option.
The tradeoff is obvious at scale: Gumroad's checkout is web-based, redirecting users away from your app. There's no native paywall, no A/B testing, no subscription migration flows, and limited control over the purchase experience. The fee also starts high — 8.5% + 30¢ is the most expensive per-transaction rate on this list before volume discounts kick in.
If you're an indie doing under $10K/month, Gumroad is perfect. Once you're past that, you're leaving money on the table.
Bottom line: Gumroad wins on simplicity, not power. It's the right call for zero-code starts, wrong call for scaling subscription apps.
4. Stripe (DIY Checkout) — Best for Large Teams with Full Engineering Bandwidth
Best For: Well-funded, enterprise-scale teams with dedicated engineering, legal, and finance departments who need maximum control over their billing stack.
| Fee Rate | 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction — but this number is misleading (see below) |
| Integration Time | 1+ week |
| Merchant of Record | ❌ You are the MoR |
| Native UI Quality | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (if you build it) |
Stripe Billing is world-class infrastructure. With AI-powered Smart Retries that recover a significant portion of failed payments and 99.99%+ uptime, Stripe is the gold standard for payment processing. Nobody disputes that.
The issue is what "DIY" actually means in practice. Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢ is just the payment processing fee. When you go outside the App Store with Stripe, you are the Merchant of Record — which means you're also on the hook for:
- Engineering time to build your paywall UI, subscription logic, entitlement management, and dunning flows
- Tax compliance via tools like TaxJar or Avalara — necessary for selling across US states and internationally
- Customer support for billing issues and refund requests
- Fraud detection and chargeback management
When you add all of that up, the "cheap" 2.9% quickly becomes more expensive than a 5% MoR solution — especially at sub-$5M ARR where you don't have a full billing ops team standing by. Real-world total cost of ownership commonly lands in the 6–10% range once engineering and compliance are factored in.
Bottom line: Stripe DIY is the right call if you're a large team with dedicated engineering bandwidth, an existing compliance function, and a desire for pixel-perfect control. For everyone else, the hidden costs outweigh the headline fee saving.
5. RevenueCat + Custom Checkout — Best for Cross-Platform Subscription Management
Best For: Cross-platform apps (iOS + Android + web) that have complex subscription logic and need a unified entitlement layer, and have engineering resources to build the checkout on top.
| Fee Rate | RevenueCat fees (~1–2% of tracked revenue) + payment processor (e.g., Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢) = ~3–5% before operational overhead |
| Integration Time | 3–5 days |
| Merchant of Record | ❌ Developer is MoR |
| Native UI Quality | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (if you build it) |
It's worth addressing a common point of confusion from the developer community directly: "RevenueCat still wraps different services, so it's important to know what it's doing and what it offers." That's exactly right. RevenueCat is a subscription management and entitlement layer, not a payment processor. It tells your app whether a user is subscribed — it doesn't process payments.
To sell outside the App Store using RevenueCat, you still need to build a separate web checkout flow (typically using Stripe), wire up entitlement management across both StoreKit and your web payment backend, and handle all MoR responsibilities yourself. As one developer noted: "You still set up subscriptions in the app dev console, they just sync into RevenueCat." — the multi-platform management overhead doesn't disappear, it just gets better organized.
RevenueCat's strength is genuine: it's excellent for apps that need a unified API for subscription state across iOS, Android, and web. If a user subscribes on web, RevenueCat makes it easy to unlock the right features in your iOS app. For cross-platform teams with that specific need and existing engineering capacity, it's a solid foundation.
But for a mobile-first team looking to simply migrate iOS subscribers off StoreKit and into direct billing, this stack is over-engineered and under-supported. You get complexity without the native UI quality or MoR protection that dedicated solutions offer.
Bottom line: RevenueCat is a powerful subscription management layer for cross-platform apps. It is not a standalone solution for selling outside the App Store — you're still building meaningful infrastructure on top of it.
Which Tool Is Right for You?
Here's the honest breakdown:
You're an indie developer with a simple app and minimal coding budget? → Go with Gumroad. You'll be live in minutes. Yes, 8.5% is steep, but the zero-engineering overhead makes it worth it at early stage.
You have a large, enterprise team with dedicated billing engineers, a legal function, and existing Stripe infrastructure? → Stripe DIY gives you maximum control. Just go in with eyes open about the true total cost.
You're cross-platform and need a unified subscription management layer across iOS, Android, and web? → RevenueCat + Custom Checkout gives you the best subscription state management, provided you have the engineering to build the checkout layer.
You need a mature all-in-one MoR for a SaaS product moving into mobile? → Paddle is a dependable, battle-tested option, even if it isn't mobile-native.
You have a scaling iOS app — subscription or gaming — doing $500K+ ARR, and you want to stop losing 25% of revenue to Apple without a six-month rebuild? → Allocents is the clear choice. It was built specifically for this moment by engineers who know StoreKit inside-out, ships in 15 minutes, handles MoR globally, and delivers native-quality paywalls that won't tank your conversion rate.
The post-Epic ruling window to sell outside the App Store is open — but only developers who move strategically will make it count. "For iOS, boring compliance tends to scale better than clever hacks" is the community wisdom that applies here: pick the solution that's clean, compliant, and built for your scale.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why should iOS developers sell outside the App Store?
The primary reason to sell outside the App Store is to significantly increase your net revenue. By bypassing Apple's In-App Purchase system, you can avoid their 15-30% commission. The April 2025 Epic v. Apple ruling made this legally possible in the US, allowing you to use direct payment solutions with much lower fees, potentially adding 20-25% back to your bottom line.
What is a Merchant of Record (MoR) and why does it matter?
A Merchant of Record (MoR) is the legal entity that takes full financial responsibility for selling to a customer. This includes handling global sales tax and VAT remittance, fraud detection, chargebacks, and currency conversions. For developers, using a service that acts as your MoR (like Allocents or Paddle) offloads a massive legal and operational burden, allowing you to focus on your app instead of navigating complex international tax laws.
What is the true cost of a "DIY" Stripe setup?
The true cost of a DIY Stripe setup is much higher than its base 2.9% + 30¢ processing fee. When you use Stripe directly, you are the Merchant of Record, which means you must also pay for engineering time to build and maintain your paywall, separate tax compliance software (like TaxJar), fraud management systems, and dedicated customer support for billing. These additional costs often push the effective fee rate into the 6-10% range.
How can I migrate existing App Store subscribers to direct billing?
Migrating existing subscribers requires a thoughtful campaign, usually by offering them a compelling discount to switch from their StoreKit subscription to direct billing. Tools specifically built for this transition, like Allocents, can automate this process. They provide features like "Switch & Save" prompts within the app that make it easy for users to move over, maximizing your migration success rate without requiring a complex manual effort.
Will I lose the native feel of Apple's In-App Purchase with these tools?
It depends entirely on the tool you choose. Solutions that rely on web views (like Gumroad or a basic Paddle integration) can feel clunky and hurt conversion rates. However, mobile-first SDKs like Allocents are purpose-built to deliver a seamless, native UI quality. They use native components (SwiftUI, etc.) to present paywalls that feel just as fluid and integrated as Apple's own IAP flow.
Is it legally compliant to use third-party payments in every country?
No, the legality of offering direct payments varies by jurisdiction. The Epic v. Apple ruling specifically applies to the US App Store. To remain compliant, you must only show alternative payment options to users in regions where it is legally permitted. Advanced solutions like Allocents offer jurisdiction-aware routing that automatically handles this, ensuring you only display direct billing options to eligible users.
Which tool is best if I'm just starting out with my app?
If you're an indie developer or just starting, a simple, all-in-one solution like Gumroad is often the best choice. While its percentage fee is higher, it requires zero engineering to set up and acts as your Merchant of Record from day one. This allows you to start selling immediately and validate your app's business model without getting bogged down in building and managing a complex billing system.
If you're ready to explore direct billing for your iOS app, start with Allocents's full MoR plan. Already have a Stripe account and an in-house compliance team? The Bring Your Own Stripe (BYOS) plan at just 0.5% of migrated revenue is one of the most cost-effective ways to unlock direct payments available today.