A general app-development brief covers scope, timeline, and budget — and misses almost everything specific to a subscription business. Billing architecture, store compliance, and churn instrumentation are where a competent generalist team and a team that has actually shipped recurring-revenue apps diverge, often invisibly, until the first App Store rejection or the first support ticket about a subscriber who cancelled but still has access.
Our general guide to briefing a development agency and our nine questions for vetting an AI-assisted team both still apply here. This is the narrower, subscription-specific supplement.
1. Questions Scoped to Billing and Store Compliance
1
Have you shipped a subscription app to both the App Store and Play Store before?
Not “we’ve built apps” — specifically subscription apps, through both review processes, including at least one renewal cycle in production.
2
How do you sync entitlements between the client and your backend?
If the answer relies solely on the client checking subscription status, push back — a user can cancel from their device’s account settings without your app ever being opened, and a client-only check will miss it.
3
What’s your approach to trial abuse and fraud?
Repeat free-trial abuse via account cycling is common enough that a team with real experience should have a specific answer, not a shrug.
4
Have you had a subscription-related App Store or Play Store rejection — and what caused it?
A team with real experience has a specific story here. A team that says “never” either hasn’t shipped much, or isn’t being candid.
5
How will you instrument churn, trial conversion, and LTV from day one?
Analytics bolted on after launch means your first two months of subscriber data — the most valuable data you’ll ever have — is incomplete or missing.
6
Who owns the RevenueCat, App Store Connect, and Play Console accounts after handoff?
Get this in writing before the project starts. An agency-owned account you don’t control is a real operational risk if the relationship ever ends.
7
What’s the plan for grandfathering pricing when you raise prices later?
Every subscription product eventually changes pricing. Whether existing subscribers keep their old price is a product decision the technical architecture needs to support from the start, not retrofit.
2. Signals Worth Watching For
Good signs
Asks about your churn/LTV targetsEarly
Specific rejection story, specific fixYes
Account ownershipIn writing
Red flags
“Subscriptions are just an API call”Undersells the work
No entitlement-sync answerClient-only risk
Vague on account ownershipLock-in risk
A note on scope
Subscription billing is genuinely one of the smaller line items in a well-run build — the entitlement architecture is usually a matter of days, not weeks, especially with RevenueCat handling the store-integration layer. The risk isn’t that it’s expensive to get right; it’s that it’s invisible to get wrong, and the mistakes surface months later as support tickets and refund disputes.
3. What a Subscription-App First Month Should Include
Week 1
Store accounts confirmed, product IDs and subscription groups drafted, RevenueCat project created
Setup
Week 1-2
Entitlement model reviewed and signed off with you before any paywall UI is built
Architecture
Week 3
Sandbox purchase flow working end-to-end on both platforms, webhook-backed entitlement sync live
Build
Week 4
Analytics instrumentation confirmed, churn/trial events flowing before first real subscriber
Instrumentation
This maps onto the general shape we lay out in what should actually happen in month one with an agency — subscription work is a variation on that process, not a different one.
Related: the ten usual App Store and Google Play rejection reasons for AI-built subscription apps.
Evaluating agencies for a subscription app build?
Send us your shortlist’s answers to the questions above, or skip straight to asking us. Either way, happy to give you a candid read.
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