Revenue counted once, creator payments on rules, and a cost review that paid for itself
Tom’s app studio sells subscriptions worldwide and pays dozens of creators every month. The same finance problems as any growing company. We fixed ours first.
- $347,981
- of sales consolidated across 5 apps
- ≈ 45
- creators paid on automated rules
- −24%
- infrastructure run-rate after a cost review
Same purchase, two systems
79%
of Superwall revenue events also came through RevenueCat
Each transaction is now counted once.
Infrastructure, per 30 days
−24%
An attribution tool, on the evidence
The situation
Avalanche Factory builds consumer apps. Its biggest, Loverzz, has passed 750,000 installs. Money comes in through four systems at once and goes out to dozens of content creators on contracts that are all a bit different. The finance questions are the ones every growing company has: what did we really sell, what do we owe, and which bills are worth paying?
What we did
Revenue that isn’t counted twice
Sales arrive through Superwall, RevenueCat, the App Store and Google Play, and the same purchase often shows up in more than one of them: 79% of Superwall’s revenue events also came through RevenueCat. One pipeline now separates gross sales, proceeds and refunds, and keeps each transaction exactly once. That’s where the $347,981 of sales across five apps comes from.
Creator payments, from spreadsheet to rules
Creator contracts mix pay-per-post, view bonuses, tiered CPM and prorated monthly fees. The spreadsheet became a rules engine: 25 contract rules migrated, each creator’s cost accrued every day, actual payouts imported automatically, and a reconciliation against the old sheet before it was retired. About 45 creators are now paid on these rules.
Cost control with evidence
Per-function usage data showed where the infrastructure bill went. Targeted fixes brought the run-rate from $871 to $659 per 30 days. The same method showed that a $650/month attribution tool was bringing an estimated $15–90/month of extra revenue, which settled the question of whether to keep it.
How it runs
Scheduled workflows run every day in the studio’s own cloud accounts, with an alert when something fails. Ad-hoc questions (“what did creators cost us per app last quarter?”) are answered from the same data, without a new export.