In-App Purchase, Stripe or Stripe Connect? Taking Payments in a Mobile App

Founders usually ask which payment provider is cheapest. On mobile, that is the wrong first question. The app stores decide which payment methods you are allowed to use, based on what you are selling, and choosing wrong gets your app rejected or your account flagged.

So start with what the money is for. There are four common cases, and many apps have more than one.

The decision in one table

Digital goods: the stores take a cut

If a purchase unlocks something inside the app — a subscription, an ad-free tier, extra features, virtual currency — Apple and Google generally require you to use their billing. Their standard commission is 30%, reduced to 15% for subscriptions after the first year and for smaller developers enrolled in Apple’s Small Business Program or within Google’s reduced-fee tier. Build the commission into your pricing from day one rather than discovering it in your first payout.

The rules are moving. In the United States, a 2025 court ruling allowed apps to link users to an outside web checkout, and the EU’s Digital Markets Act opened alternative payment options there under Apple’s own terms. These options are regional, come with conditions, and are still being challenged and revised. If outside payments matter to your business model, check the current guidelines for each country you sell in before you build around them — and assume the in-app option still needs to exist for everyone else.

Why we use RevenueCat for subscriptions

StoreKit on iOS and Play Billing on Android are different APIs with different receipt formats, renewal events and edge cases: grace periods, refunds, family sharing, upgrades between tiers, restored purchases on a new phone. You can build all of that yourself, server-side receipt validation included. Most startups should not.

RevenueCat wraps both stores behind one SDK and one backend, gives you a single answer to “is this user premium?” across platforms, and sends webhooks your server can trust. It is free up to a revenue threshold and charges a small percentage above it — check their current pricing. It is what runs subscriptions in Leklok, Chattick and BackMe.

Real-world goods and services: Stripe

If the user is buying something that exists or happens outside the app — a product shipped to them, a booking, a ticket, a ride, a service delivered in person — you must not use In-App Purchase. Use a payment processor such as Stripe, ideally with Apple Pay and Google Pay enabled so checkout is a tap rather than a card form. The stores take no commission on these payments; your processor charges its normal fees.

A few cases are less obvious:

• One-to-one services between two people in real time, such as tutoring or a consultation, can generally use outside payment, even though they happen in the app.
• Business purchases, such as a company buying ad placements or listings in your marketplace, often belong on the web rather than in the app. Selling them through a web dashboard keeps the in-app experience simple and avoids the question entirely.
• Donations and tips have their own rules, which differ between Apple and Google and depend on who receives the money.

Paying users out: Stripe Connect

The app stores collect money; they do not distribute it. If your app pays people — creators earning from their audience, sellers in a marketplace, users cashing out referral rewards — you need a platform built for payouts. Stripe Connect is the common choice.

Connect handles the parts that are hard and regulated: verifying the identity of each person you pay, collecting tax information, holding funds, and sending money to their bank account. With Express accounts, Stripe hosts the onboarding and a simple dashboard for each recipient, so you do not store bank details or identity documents yourself.

That is how Chattick works: subscriptions run through RevenueCat, while rewards, contests and referrals pay out through Stripe Connect Express, with Cloud Functions moving balances. Two systems, each doing the job it is allowed to do.

Before you promise payouts, check that Connect supports payouts to the countries where your users live. Coverage is broad but not universal, and it decides whether your feature can launch everywhere at once.

Free tiers and advertising

Ads are not a payment method, but they are often the other half of the revenue model: a free tier funded by ads, and a subscription that removes them. BackMe runs exactly this pattern with RevenueCat and AdMob.

Two things to plan for:

• Consent. On iOS, personalised ads need the App Tracking Transparency prompt. In the EEA and UK, Google requires a certified consent management platform before showing personalised ads.
• Product cost. Ads in an app built around trust or privacy can damage it. Chattick is ad-free by design, because a privacy-first messenger full of ad trackers is not a privacy-first messenger.

Mixing models is normal

Real products combine these. A creator app might sell subscriptions through In-App Purchase, sell coins to fans through In-App Purchase, and pay creators out through Stripe Connect. A marketplace might take payments for physical goods through Stripe and charge sellers a monthly fee through a web dashboard.

The mistakes that cost the most are architectural, not technical:

• Building one payment system for everything, then discovering half the purchases are not allowed to use it.
• Treating the store commission as an afterthought in your unit economics.
• Keeping entitlements in two places, so a user who subscribed on iPhone is not premium on Android or the web. Pick one source of truth and make everything else ask it.
• Skipping webhooks. Renewals, refunds and failed payments happen when your app is closed. Your server needs to hear about them.

Getting it right before the build

Payment architecture is cheap to decide on a whiteboard and expensive to change after launch, when real money and real users are involved. It is one of the things we settle during MVP Discovery, alongside the store rules that apply to your category. If you are already rejected or stuck, our mobile app development team has shipped RevenueCat, Stripe, Stripe Connect and Square in production apps — and our guide to App Store rejection reasons covers the review side.